The New York Review Of Science Fiction #037 (1991 09)

This Scan is

COURTSEY OF THE

Lenny Silver
Collection

Number Thirty-Seven
Septemb^ 1991
$2.50

James Cappio

Through the Momus Glass

The Paper Grail by James P. Blaylock

New York: Ace. 1991; $17.95 he; 371 pages.

The Paper Grail of the title of James P. Blajdock’s latest novel is a
purported sketch, attributed to Hoku-sai, that can be folded and
refolded to show fiDrth a different pattern every time. As such it is an
extraordinarily apt symbol for Blajdock’s whole body of significant work
up to now. For like the artificer who appears in nearly all of his novels —
such as Giles Peach in The Dt£^n^ Lernuthan, Will Keeble in Homun-
culus, and now Bennet and Mr. Jimmers in ThePuper Gruil — Blaylock
is practiced in combining fimiliar elements into novel patterns.

The Paper Grail also exhibits thematic and structural continuity
with such novels as The Digging LepiaAan, Homunculus, and The Last
Coin. In characteristically understated feshion, Blaylock carries on the
work of the father of modernity in literature, Laurence Sterne, to
extremes otherwise unknown in contemporary science fiction and
fentasy. Blajdock revealed his method when he chose a passage fi-om
Tristram Shandy as the epigraph for The Last Coin:

“ — Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men
in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, — have they not
had their Hobby-Horses; — their running-horses, their coins
and their cockle-shells, their drums and dieir trumpets, their
fiddles, their pallets, their maggots and their butterflies? — and
so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly
along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to
get up behind him, — pray. Sir, what have either you or I to do
with it?” {Tristram Shandy, 1.7)

Sterne’s influence on Blajdock is no secret. Recall foe reference to
Edward St. Ives’s glass-bottomed bucket, in The Digging Leviathan, as
“Momus’s glass” (see Tristram Shandy, 1.23), or even Tristram’s
defense, at foe very beginning of the book, of the beleaguered homun-
culus (Tristram Shandy, 1.2), in the context of the notorious winding
of the clock. Blaylock’s choice of epigraph shows us, though, that the
principal influcence of Sterne is his techniques of characterization.
Volume I, Chapter 23 of Tristram Shandy itfcncd to Momus’s glass,
a mythical window in the stomach, as ma^g characterization unnec-
essary:

[N]othing more would have been wanting, in order to have
taken a man’s character, but to have taken a chair and gone
softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and looked in, —
viewed foe soul stark naked; . . . — ^then taken your pen and ink
and set down nothing but vfoat you have seen, and could have
sworn to ... .

Since there is no such window, Sterne must draw the picture of My
Uncle Toby he promised three chapters previously by indirect means:

To avoid all and every one of these errors, in giving you my
xmclc Toby’s character, I am determined to draw it by no

( Continued on page 8)

In this issue

James Cappio takes a
Stemc look at James P. Blaylock
Arinn Dembo pves her regards to Tim Powers
Frank Dietz finds Utopia to be a reasonable
world as well as a mystery of chaos
Robert Legault follows the smoke
of Alice Sheldon’s fire

Plus brain children, kidding about death, a bible
reading, and still more sleepwriting

Arinn Dembo

Impassion’d Clay:

On Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard

In the Slammer of 1988, 1 stood in the marble halls of the Rodin
Museum in Philadelphia, sweating like an old cheese; foe buildmg,
containing dozens ofpriceless bronze and porcelain sculptures, had no
air conditioning, and no security. A fat guard on a stool sat at the
entrance, farming himself in his sleep with a brochure. The only living
beings circulating amidst foe sculptures were flies . I was oblivious; in my
notebook, I recorded my impressions offoe pieces foatmost struckme.
The most remarkable of all was called “I Am Beautiful”; foe title was
taken firom a poem by Baudelaire, and some fiiendly archivist had
copied foe lines on a plaque beneath it.

Here is what I wrote, on July 6, 1988:

L Am Beautiful 1 882 Bronze

“I am beautiful as a dream of stone,
but not maternal.

And my breast, where men arc slain,
none for his learning,

Is made to inspire in the poet passions
that, burning

Are mute and carnal as matter is eternal.”

A man lifting a woman in his arms holds her poised as if
to crush her against his chest, or throw her down fi'om a great
height . . . indescribable.

These two powerful figures engaged in their strange embrace
stand on a pedestal ufoich strongly suggests some rocky precipice. The
statuette made a great impression on me at the time, although it was in
foe company of much more famous (and certainly much larger) pieces,
including The Burghers of Calais, The Eternal Sprif^gtime, and TheHand
of God. I Am Beautiful seemed to me to embody a potent paradox in
the ambivalence offoe male figure: Will he hold her to his breast? Or

( Continued on page 3 )

Books for sale

j DRAGON PRESS

1

f Age of Wonders by David G. Hartwell,

J paperback $3.95, he $15.00
I "Anybody who wants to know what sf is
I really about must read this book"
i — Terry Carr

.1 In Milton Lumky Territory by Philip K.

I Dick, Dragon Press he with dj $40.00
3 Russian Science Fiction Bibliography by
I Darko Suvin, Dragon Press he $20.00
. i The American Shore: Meditations on a
Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas
M. Disch — Angouleme by Samuel R.
Deiany, Dragon Press he $20.00
Starboard Wine by Samuel R. Deiany,

' Dragon Press he signed $40.00
I The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H.P.
^ Lovecraft by Barton L. St. Armand,
i Dragon Press ho $20.00

'i

; Pogo Books by Wait Keiiy

■i

/ Go Pogo Gregg Press he with dj $30.00
The incompieat Pogo Gregg Press he with
dj $20.00

Gone Pogo Gregg Press he with dj $30.00
; Potiuck Pogo Gregg Press he with dj
? $20.00

'1 The Pogo Papers Gregg Press he with dj

3 $20.00

■ The Pogo Peek-A-Book Gregg Press ho
^ with dj $20.00

Pogo 4 La Sundae Gregg Press he with dj
$20.00

The Pogo Stepmother Goose Gregg
Press he with dj $20.00
Unde Pogo So-So Stories Gregg Press he
with dj $20.00

Orion Shali Rise by Poul Anderson, Time-
scape Books with dj $25.00
The Night Face and Other Stories by Poul i'
Anderson, Gregg Press with dj $20.00 j
Bio of a Space Tyrant, Volume 2: Merce-
nary by Piers Anthony, Gregg Press he S'

$ 20.00 ^ .

Bio of a Space Tyrant, Votume 3: Poiitician ^
by Piers Anthony, Gregg Press he with dj I » ■
$ 20.00 '

Corona by Greg Bear, Gregg Press he with dj ■ :
$15.00

Isiands in the Sky by Arthur C. Clarke, Gregg ,
Press he with dj $20.00 •

The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick, Time- ' ■
scape Books with dj $30.00
Radio Free Aibemuth by Philip K. Dick, Arbor' "
House ho with dj $20.00 * ■

The Finai Refiection by John M. Ford, Gregg
Press he with dj $15.00

Count Zero by William Gibson, Arbor House ■
he $20.00 f

yearwood by Paul Hazel, Atlantic, Little, S

Brown ho with dj $25.00 i

Chiidren of Dune by Frank Herbert, Berkley/ ; •
Putnam he with dj $20.00
Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein, I
Gregg Press he $20.00 I

The Greeen Miilenium by Fritz Leiber, Gregg f
Press he $20.00

A Canticie for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller,

Jr., Gregg Press he $20.00
The War Hound and the Worid's Pain by
Michael Moorcock, Timescape Books with .
dj $20.00 '

Key Out of Time by Andre Norton, Gregg ;

Press he with dj $20.00

Star Trekby Gene Roddenberry, Simon & ?

Schuster signed limited edition boxed he
$50.00

A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski,
Arbor House with dj $25.00

Please make checks payable in U.S. funds to Dragon Press
Please include $2.00 shipping and postage with each order, for trade discounts, please inquire.
Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantuille, NY 10570

will he throw her down? In the lines of the body it was apparent to me
that he wants, passionately, to do both; there is a combination there of
love and loathing, of desire and disgust 'Khkh simply defies words.

Or rather, it defied words until I read The Stress of Her Regard. It
was my first Tim Powers book; I was looking for the rest of his work
within a fortnight. At this sitting I have read six of his novels with no
regrets; if there are others, they have eluded me thus fer.

I might have been disappointed, after reading Powers’ oeuvre
backward fi-om what is without doubt his finest novel to date; fortu-
nately, all ofhis books rush by with such delirious forccthat there is very
little time for disappointment. I found a great deal to like — e\en,
occasionally, to love-^ The Anubis Gates, The Drawing! of the Dark,
On Stranger Tides, Dinner at Deviant^s Palace, and even in The Skies
Discrowned, a book ^ch probably embarrasses its author at this late
date . A chart ofhis growing skill and potency would show a remarkable
leap with each book Powers has published since 1976; with The Stress
of Her Regard, he has rocketed into the *ther.

I was quite interested in the critical response to the book; having
gotten so much out of it myself, I thou^t it could have received
nothing but raves genre- wide. I was horrified when I read the dismissal
of the book— and of Powers— written by Greg Cox, in NTRSTfor
October 1989.

Cox takes Tim Powers, a writer who routinely and gracefully defies
categorization, and tries to stuff him down the Horror oubliette; then
proceeds to tuckhimlovingly into Procrustes’ bed byjudging TheS^ess
of Her Regard a failure because it docs not conform to the conventiorw
of a notoriously Neanderthalic subgenre. His review serves as grapHc
evidence for the hypothesis that this genre is not so ready to leave its
anti-intellectual ghetto as some might think. He contemptuously refitrs
to the Romantic poets as “the Villa Diodati gang,” and seems unable to
imagine any significance in these figures beyond the widespread artistic
lootings \s*ich have taken place within the genre-^nost ofwhich fiicus
on the summer of 1816 because Mary Shelley’s iT-awiutwrftwfi originated
there. Ultimately, Cox seems to think that The Stress of Her Regard is

an unsuccessful vampire novel; his parochial reading is a massive
disservice to the book, and should beheld up to one and all as a warning:
if you do not read outside the genre, eventually you will not be able to.

The virtues of Stress arc divided into three parts, as follows.

I. “Had I Met These Lines . .

Primus, it is a pleasure to read because it is so quintessentially
Powers. AH of his characteristic strengths arc present. To say that he
plots like a madman, that his keen eye for historical detaU is a delight,
that his research is admirably thorough, that his prose is swift and
evocative, his dialog frequentiy witty, his approach to a classic fantasy
trope — in this case, vampirism — ^refreshing and unconventional, will
gamer a response of “What else is new?” I wiH spend no time on these
things, commending the uninitiated to his books and to tiie critics who
have gone before me.

The Stress of Her Regard is Powers, tinmistakably and marvelously,
but a very different Powers from the one femiliar to many. This book
shares its historical setting with The Anubis Gates, and echoes some of
the more horrific imagery of On Stranger Tides, but really it resembles
neither ; in treatment and tone, it is much more closely related to Dinner
at Deviant^s Palace. Both boofo share an uncustomary stem approach;
gone is the sense ofplay behind the labyrinthine twists and txarns ofplot,
gone also the underlying sense of humor which animated The Anubis
Gates and The Drawing of the Dark. Dinner and Stress are not mere
entertainment, and neither book ends with its final page; both are
concerned with the eternal, and wdien Powers is confronting God (or,
as in Stress, the Goddess-Muse), he doesn’t take the time to screw
around. He’s deadly serious — and ten times as effective because of it.

AH Powers’ books are journeys into the extremes ofhuman suffix-
ing, and Sfr«ris no exception. I think Powers is to be commended for
this, rather than criticized; his characters are real human beings, and
when the shit hits the fan they get hurt. So often, genre novels seem to
be inhabited by a race of indestructible stunt -men, who can survive the
most ridiculous perils without ever coming to harm, and obliviously

— The New York Review of Science Fiction

ISSUE #37 September 1991
Volume 4, No. 1 ISSN #1052-9438

FEATURES

Arinn Dembo: Impassion’d Clay: On Tim Powers’ ThB Stress of Her Regerd: 1
Gregory Feeley: Howard Whom?: A
Michael Swanwick: Writing in My Sleep (Eighth in a Series): 6
Candaa Jane Dorsey: Deconstructing Deconstructing Vietnam: 12
Greg Cox: Excerpts from The Transylvanien Library: A Consumer's Guide to Vampire Fiction: 21

REVIEWS

James P. Blaylock’s The Paper Grail, reviewed by James Cappio: 1
George Turner’s Brain Child, reviewed by Brian Stableford: 1 1
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, reviewed by Leonard Rysdyk: 1 3
James Tiptree, Jr.’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, reviewed by Robert Legault: 1 8
Kate Wilhelm’s Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos and
Damon Knight’s A Reasonable World, reviewed by Frank Dietz: 20

PLUS

Reading lists by Suzy McKee Charnas (p. 9), Larry Niven (p. 10), Fernando Q. GouvOa (p. 14)
and Jonathan Lethem (p.18); a lettercolumn (p. 23); and an editorial (p. 24).

Kathryn Cramer, Features Editor; L. W. Currey, Contributing Editor; Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor;

David G. Hartwell, Reviews Editor; Robert K. J. Killhefter, Managing Editor; Gordon Van Gaidar, Managing Editor.
Staff: Kevin Helfenbein, Shira Daemon, Kenneth L. Houghton, Donald G. Keller.

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P. O. Box 78, Pleasantville NY 10570.

$2.50 per copy. Annual subscriptions: In U.S., $25; $29 Canada; $33 First Class;
overseas $37 (via Air Printed Matter). For overseas air mall, please Inquire. Domestic Institutional subscriptions $29.
’ Please make checks payable to Dragon Press, and payable In U.S. funds.

Copyright @1991 Dragon Press.

Gregory Feeley

Howard Whom?

When the library of America editors get around to
compiling Howard Waldrop’s stories, they may find their
usual practice of establishing texts by going back to the
manuscripts of dubiom value. The story title “What Makes
Heironymous Run?” appears to misspell the painter’s name
two times in one word, a seeming hovder which one initially
attributes to Waldropian slyness, save that the text (which
makes no mention of Bosch) gives no indication of being set
in an alternate universe where Bosch spelled his name diflFer-
ently. The story was first published and first collected by small
presses, lending credence to the theory (however implausible )
that neither editors nor author caught vsdiat was simply a pair
of typos.

If Waldrop’s afifiliation with small presses has been a
boon to his readers, keeping the light afiame while trade
houses puzzle their way toward some means of marketing
his fiction, it has been a headache for redactors yet unborn.
The publishers of small presses do not hire copyeditors and do
not themselves edit. Waldrop’s last three books have been
gamely issued by small presses, and each has resulted in varioiis
marred texts, like flyspecked stained-glass windows. If trade
reprint houses arc taking these texts as canonical, the Library
of America editors will have a job waiting for them next
century.

“Fin de Cycl6” is an original story first published in
Waldrop’s Night of Cooten (Ursus/Ziesing, 1991 al-
though dated 1990, but never mind that). Set in an alternate
Belle Epoque Paris in which the French Army has a Bicycle
Infantry and Pablo Picasso is a decent human being, the story
amiably restitches numerous quilt squares from Roger
Shattu^’s The Banquet Xean, adding some whole doth. As
the ghastly title suggests, however, Waldrop seems to know
no French, nor did anyone tell him that “cycle” puns on
“si^cle” qmte well, and comes closer in sound without the
pointless accent mark. Lapses such as “mon capitainc” and
“Champs-^lys6es”mcrcly vex, but Waldrop muffi the frmous
opening line of Ubu Roi, to which he devotes an entire scene
and to which he returns in the story’s final sentence . “Merdre”
was wit, “merde” is merely scatology.

More alarmingly, other stories, first published by major
houses with capable copyeditors, contain errors their original
versions had lacked. Early in “Thirty Minutes Over Broad-

way!” the reader snags an eye on the following slip: “ T’d
rather be asleep,’ he shook the reporter’s hand.” The previous
page had contained a couple other punctuation errors: noth-
ing major, but inarguable. Suspicions roused, one checks
Wild Cards I, where the story first appeared, and finds that all
of them had been corrected. This dears up matters
considerably. Night of the Cooters is set from Waldrop’s
manuscripts, a dedsion wdiich substitutes the professional
copyediting of such publishers as Omni, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, and Bantam Books for those of Ursus/Ziesing.

This determined, one may make an informed dedsion
whether to read Wallop’s stories on add-free paper, with
color illustrations and endpapers, or in a format with correct
spelling and punctuation. Reprinters are offering an inexpen-
sive format with neither amenity. (In fairness, it would take an
editor, not a copyeditor, to query the scene in A Donxn Tough
/ofa which ends with the breathless announcement, “lindy
made it! ” Of course Charles lindber^ was not “lindy” until
after he had made it, but the fect-checkers at Mark V. Hesing
let it go, and it’s now too late to change.)

In ascertaining whether a small press takes any pains to
copyedit the books they bind in leather, it can be useful to
apply the Hieronymus Test. The test works imusually well on
the works of Harlan Ellison, who refers often to Hieronymus
Bosch (usually as a casual synecdoche for some kind of
phantasmagoria) and frequently gets it wrong. If the publish-
ing house reproduces the error, you may wonder about its
copyeditor. On this point not only Ursus, but Mirage Press,
the Nemo Press, and Underwood Miller all flunk. (On the
other hand, Nemo Press’s The Essential Ellison credits Gil
Lament — “quite simply the finest, most punctilious copyedi-
tor and proofreader in the business” — ^with having read
through the text 23 times; and Mirage Press’s The Harlan
Ellison Hornbook misspells Hieronymus only in the Index,
wfrich is credited to Lament. So results can perhaps be thrown
off when an author brings in a copyeditor whose weak spot
matches his own.)

Another Waldrop collection has been annoxmeed for
next year, again from a small press. Presumably it will not
follow the copyedited magazine texts, but British and paper-
back editions will follow it.

rU be concentrating on the illustrations. ^

weather events that would leave a real person gibbering in a comer
somewhere. . . . Nevertheless, the psychological and physical destruc-
tion wreaked upon the characters in t^ book is exhausting. Before the
final page is turned, the ostensible protagonist will have lost a finger, will
have a hot pistol ball removed from his bleeding leg without anaesthetic
in the pouring rain, will have been literally crucified — and next to the
racking guilt and longing, the loss, despair and hideous ecstasy going on
within, what happens to his exterior is a Sunday stroll.

Transfiguration ofthe soul through devastation ofthe body figures
prominently in Dinner at Depiant^sRalace 2 swdi. like Gregorio Rivas
of Dinner, Michael Crawford of Stress is not really fully sympathetic
until a number of horrible things have happened to him. Both men are
deeply flawed personalities, and altiiough their problems are different,
the method of overcoming them is the same. The brutality, greed and
cold self-interest were progressively beaten out of Rivas, imtil he could
take to heart the suffering of another person; the self-pity, the enerva-
tion and the inability to extend compassion tow^ud an adult are beaten
and tortured out of Qrawford, xmtil he is able to answer the call of his
conscience. Unlike Rivas Crawfrjrd is not alone in his transformation;
all the dramatis person* of The Stress of Her Regard have crushing
lessons to learn about blindness, love and sacrifice. “Spare the rod, spofl

4 The New Yor1< Review of Science Fiction

the character,” is apparently Powers’ motto.

I won’t try to unravel the plot here. A brief summary ofthe premise
goes like this: Michael Crawford, a middle-aged man of ambivalent
moral character, is on his way to be married. While drunk, he slips the
wedding ring meant for his bride on the finger of a marble statue, so as
not to lose it in the mud while tussling outdoors on a stormy night. He
has accidentally performed a marriage ritual with a vampiress, one of an
andent race of living stone; the consequences of this action include the
grisly death of his human fiancee on their wedding ni^t and a
stumbling lurch into the lives of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John
Keats. It would seem that the tribe of the lamia has an car for poetry, and
m assignation with one of them can turn a person with the inclination
into an immortal bard— if it doesn’t kill him early. The title. The Stress
of Her R^ard, refers to the transformative gaze of a gorgon.

Stress has a rather high alcohol content. The omnipresence of
alcohol should surprise no one; this one is only about eight percent,
unlila The Drawing of the Dark,'fM<Ai is about nothing ifit isn’t about
beer, Dinner at Deviant^s Palaee, in which brandy is the only form of
hard currency, and On Stranger Tides, with its rum-guzzling rituals
amongst the pirates of the West Indies. liquor doesn’t really have a
central role in The Stress of Her Regard, but ofcourse it is used to sterilize

wounds for lack of other antiseptic, the protagonist drinks rather
excessively, the action begins in a pub during a pre-nuptial piss-up for
a bachelor and his two best friends . . . and I am always a little bemused
to see how well Ivlr. Powers can make an alcoholic image work for him
in passages that have nothing specifically to do with drinking:

The oily scent of the pines was diminishing as die
travellers got higher, like the taste of juniper in a glass of gin
that’s being rcMed with icy vodka . . .

The prose never flinches. It is as swift and fluid and compelling as
it has ever been, and more so. After reading The Stress of Her Regard, I
feared for the author’s health; the intensity, the unswerving deadly
purpose took me considerably aback. Moments like the following — and
they are legion — enable one to endure; even in the most agonizing,
torturous scene there is a beauty which carries the shaft home, and
carries the reader forward.

With tears in his eyes, SheUey took hold of the two iron
rods in one hand and the strings in the other, then let the body
slide out of his arms so that it dangled above the warped
pavement — and, as Byron sidled away in the shadows, Shelley
began yanking the strings and rods, making the body dance
grotesquely. Torchlight glinted red on the helmet, which was
lolling loosely at the level of his belt.

His teeth were clenched and he wasn’t permitting himself
to think, except to hope that the impossibly hard thudding of
his heart might kill him instantly, and thou^ over the rushing
of blood in his ears he was vaguely aware that the soldiers had
begun muttering, it wasn’t until he sneaked an upward glance
through his eyebrows that he realized that they were dissatis-
fied with the show — ^that they’d seen better, that they had
higher standards \s4ien it came to this sort of thing.

Somehow that made die vrfiole situation even a little bit
worse. It occurred to him that he now knew something that
perhaps no one else in the world did — ^that there was no curse
more horrible than. May your daughter die and be made into a
puppet which finds disfavor befin'e an audience of Austrian
soldiers.

How SheUey came to this sorry pass I wiU leave a mystery for those
who have not read the book. But to paraphrase Coleridge, had I met these
lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should instantly have
screamed out “Powers!”

II. The Villa Diodati Gang

If I ever acquire a time -travelling machine, I hope I wiU be able to
get Tim Powers to write up a little tourist guide for me: Lives of the
Romantics, or How to Visit the Early Nineteenth Century on Only Ten
Shillings Tuppence a Day. In it would be a day-by-day breakdown of
where each Romantic would likely be found, vhat he or she would likely
be doing, what sorts ofphilosophical issues would be occupying his/her
mind, and what would be the most unobtrusive disguise for a visitor
from the future to assume. Also, of course, there would be advice about
howto behave, the best jUaces to eat, instructions for working a pistol
which fires balls instead of bullets, and other useful t^s.

Point being, ofeourse, that Powers quite obviously knows all ofthis
stuff. His intimacy with the era brings it alive on the page; from the drift
of bean husks in the streets of Rome to the “cutting” wards of St. Guy’s
Hospital, the Romantic Period is present on every page of The Stress of
Her Regard, with its horrors intact.

Stress derives a great deal ofits power from the author’s fiuniliarity
with the poetry and letters of Keats, Byron and SheUey. The quotes with
which Powers heads his chapters are authentic, and quite chilling in die
context of fantasy he builds around them. It can give the reader a not-
altogcthcr pleasurable fiisson to read a passage, and feel the sands of
history shift treacherously underfoot — ^Powers’ lunatic version of the
lives of the poets is so damnably attractive, and frequently makes much
more sense than the facts.

I found his characterizations of aU the young Romantics (and their
respective loved ones and companions) to be masterful; not because
they were objectively complete — The Stress of Her Regard is not a

biography — but because they provide aU that is necessary to evoke these
historical figures without making them impossible to control as fic-
tions.

Byron, in particular, was a masterpiece of control: “I am such a
strange melange of good and evil, that it would be diflEcult to describe
me.” The job of msiking the man fit into the book was no easy one. It
was really a question of what Powers could aUow to remain; a com-
pletely dmwn Byron would have taken over the book at swordpoint and
piloted it to the moon. He did not dare make Byron so charming as he
often was in real life — nor certainly so fiinny. Byron on his time in
Switzerland, where he wrote the third Canto of Childe Harold^s
Eifgrimagt. “I was half mad during the time of its composition,
between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable,
thoughts imutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.”
This is viiat Powers left in: the experience at Lake Leman and the dark
passion of the Byronic pose. What he left out was the spirit which
animates the next sentence: “I should, many a good day, have blown
my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure
to my mother-in-law.”

Similarly, in Italy Byron is a grim figure. The man is composing
Don Juan right before Crawford’s eyes in one scene, but the good
humor, the rest and even joy behind the poem is nowhere present in his
demeanor. Is this the man who casually tossed off two rhymes for
“Agamemnon”? No. Is this the man who went to the Ambrosiana and
pilfered a golden strand of Lucretia Borgia’s hair? No. His character is
recognizably Byron, but it is a Byron in shadow, with all his flaws
showing and many of his virtues hidden, being devoured by malign
influences.

— ^we become the spoil

Of our infection, till too late and too long

We may deplore and struggle with the coil.

In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong

Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.

(Canto Three, verse 69 Childe Harold: [Switzerland])

Powers’ recreation of Shelley is also excellent, although students
of Shelley’s life and poetry may bridle at his portrayal here. “Poor
Shelley I think he has his Quota of good qualities, in sooth la! ” (Keats)
Powers has elected to ignore those good qualities, for the most part;
Shelley is a sort of “guiltiest party” in Stress. The most visible lamia in
the book is his sister, a dark stone twin tom from his own body in 1 81 1 ,
after many years of masquerading as one of his ribs. True, he does not
give her invitation to torment him, as do most of those afficted in the
book; she is integral to his being and he is apparendy a stone-flesh
hybrid himself. However, he knows the most and does the least for the
longest, until the lamia has accounted for all the terrible losses which
plagued him throughout his life, including several of his children.

His politics? Absent, or negligible. His optimism, his idealism?
Again, ghosUy if there at all. I p>incd the most, however, for the painful
sweetness oiths. man, the gentleness and generosity of his spirit. Byron
said, “You were all bmtally mistaken about Shelley, wlio was, without
exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one
who was not a beast in comparison.” Powers makes it clear that Shelley
is near penniless when wc sec him at Pisa, but neglects to inform us of
the reason; the poet assumed the debts of his father-in-law and gave his
money awa.y to various indigent fiiends, including Leigh Himt.

NeverAeless, the portrait is strangely engaging. I sympathized
with the character as j>ortrayed enough to dread his death — an achieve -
ment worthy of some note.

Powers seems to have drawn this darker fictional poet more from
Shelley’s poetry than from his life; I would point to “Alastor; or The
Spirit of Solitude” as a probable soiurce of such of the imagery and
obsession associated with Shelley in The Stress of Her Rivard. Mary
Shelley borrowed from “Alastor” as well, to write Frankenstein; the
collaborative nature of the novel is not often mentioned in the genre
lootings associated with the simuner of 1816, but Powers points it out
in Stress.

As to Mary: Paren Miller, writing for Locus, thought that she
should have been a more vivid character. I disagree; I think it is simply
his affection for her that causes Powers to make her even so vivid as she
is. By Ms. Shelley’s own admission: “Many and long were the conver-

The New York Review of Science Fiction 5

sations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to wWch I was a devout but
nearly silent listener.” During the time described in the Casa Magni,
Mary was depressed and withdrawn; she was mourning the loss of two
ofher children, who died in quick succession, and the harmony between
herself and her husband was gone. Since the Shelley household is being
viewed by an outside observer, Powers hasn’t much to work with, if he
wants to keep up his dangerous flirtation with the &cts.

John Keats also makes two appearances in The Stresf of Her Regard;
early on, he helps die fugitive Midiael Crawford escape from En^and,
and later Crawford is called upon to assist him at his death (in a powerful
sequence which is one of the finest in the book). Keats is a brief sketeh,
but one of the best, perhaps because his concerns are all presented
quickly and cleanly, without moral ambiguity. Tuberculosis was the
demon which robbed Keats, his mother and his brother of their lives;
this may also make him fit more comfortably within a vampire novel —
consumption and vampirism being notoriously interchangeable, so fiu:
as symptoms go.

“I will write independently. The Genius of Poetry must work out
its own salvation in a man.” isiats was particularly sensitive to poetic
influences, and very jealous of his talent; he declined to partake of
Shelley’s society in order to avoid the coloration of his work and
dissociated himself from Leigh Hunt so as not to be looked upon as
Hunt’s pupil. In Stress, Keats says of the vampiric Muse: “ — ^my poetry
is my own, damn you. I — I can’t help a lot of my situation — the
protection, the extended life — but I will notlct them have anything to
do with my writing.” Of all the poets here portrayed, Keats has the least
attraction to the lamia he hosts, vhich would be entirely in keeping with
his chararter. The final days of his life, the epitaph he chose for himself,
and his last letters are all drawn beautifully together with the fantasy
elements of the book when he meets his end in Rome. He is permitted
to be as heroic and touching on the page as he was in life — a rare joy.

Don’t mistake me; an unlearned reader can still derive great
pleasure from this book and will still feel a great deal of its impact. But
to really appreciate the artistry of Powers’ creation, one needs to have
read the source material; so often, he invokes a poem and its imagery
without giving the text on the page — as in the scene in which he has
Byron reading “Christabel” aloud to his guests at the Villa Diodati,
without letting the reader sec the verses (unless in his own mind). He
performs the same trick with Keats and his poem “Lamia,” which figures
very prominently in The Strea of Her Regard, not only within the story
but ^so in the writing of the novel.

Occasionally one or the other of the characters will paraphrase a
line from his own poetry in conversation; one of the most noticeable
instances is offered by Shelley, an argument which was taken from the
third act of Prome^eus Unbound — ^naturally, Byron cuts him off with a
paraphrase from Childe Harold.

Silly stuff, but it’s good to be able to catch it. For those interested
in the connections, see my ramshackle bibliography.

m. A Dream of Stone.

I return after a longwh stroll through sundry critical reflections to
the Rodin Museum, a poem by Baudelaire, and the presence of the
eternal in The Stress of Her R^ard. This book explores the aphelion of
erotic love, and every page reverberates with the presence of Divinity —
a twisted, devouring Goddess whose image would strike a chord of love
and terror in any artist’s heart.

Baudelaire knew her, and sang to her in Flowers ofEvik “After she
had broken my bones,” he said, “and sucked out the marrow . . .” The
modem poet Leonard Bird describes her as slender and pale, with
brown eyes and hair: “I first met Her when I was thirteen. It was the first
time I had ever wanted a woman so badly that I felt physically sick to my
stomach. . . I’ve met Her several times since then.” She walks in beauty
like the night, She is nothing like the sim; the passion and torment of
Her poet is meat and drink to Her.

As for him: he hates Her; he wants Her; he finds Her irresistible,
despite foe full knowledge that She is destroying him and all he loves.
But ye gods ! The work he ’s producing is inspired as never before . . . and
so it goes on; he can’t get away, can’t even be sure he wants to. Rodin
cast the dilemma in bronze and pointed the finger at Baudelaire, but
really foe statue might have been inspired by any number of p^ts.

The repetition of Goddess imagery has an almost hallucinatory,

6 The New York Review of Science Fiction

Michael Swanwick

Writing in My Sieep

(Eighth in a Series)

I’d hate to think that my dreams are derivative. But from
internal evidence I deduce that this particular dream was
heavily influenced by RA. Lafferty, here telescoped and
doubled to create the eponymous Rafferty Rafferty. There is
no getting aroimd the feet that this interpretation of the
“difference that makes no difference” was done earlier by
Lafferty. And, much as it pains me to admit it, he did it better.

“Rafferty Rafferty and Mr. Bog”

I dreamed last nigjit of Rafferty Rafferty and Mr. Bog,
wdiom nobody could tell apart. They were absolutely identi-
cal.

Granted, Rafferty Raferty was twenty years Mr. Bog’s
senior. Their hair difered in color and cut, and Rafferty
Rafferty had ten times foe nose Mr. Bog had. The one was
short and fet, the other skinny and tall. Their eyes differed in
color, size and shape. Mr. Bog had a square jaw^ere Rafferty
Raflferty’s was pointed. They were of different races, and one
had a wooden leg while the other had an extra thumb .

But in all foe important wzys they were exactly alike.

incantory power; there are simply too many startlingly intense visions,
page after page, to dte more than a few of the most disturbing. Aboard
a ship sailing by night to France, this honeymoon scene occurs:

The thing was moving — ^walking, to judge by foe regu-
lar, ponderous jars Crawford felt through the deck — and he
opened his eyes in fear or even eagerness in case it might be
coming toward him; but it was crossing to one of the
portholes, and as it got closer to the moonlit circle he could
see it more and more clearly.

Its torso seemed to be a huge bag at one moment and a
boulder in the next, and foe surface of it was bumpy like chain
mail; and when it had plodded its way on elephantine legs to
the porthole, he could see that its head was just an angular
lump with shadow that implied cheekbones and eye sockets
and a slab of jaw.

Oddly, it seemed female to him.

It didn’t have arms to rest on foe porthole rim, but
Crawford sensed something weary about it — he got the
impression that it had no particular purpose in getting up . . .
that it was just looking thoughtfully out to sea as any sleepless
voyager might.

The crude, monolithic quality of the rendering here brings foe
Venus of Waldorf to mind. The lamia has many guises. She is also
Shelley’s doppclganger, and can assume a graceful, Grecian statuary
form ... or appear as a winged serpent madonna that would have been
quite at home in Babylonia, 3,500 years ago. It’s impossible to say how
much of this is deliverable or conscious on the author’s part. As I said
earlier, there is a blessedness to this book, a sort of fortuitous grace vfoich
cannot be attributed to rigorous thought alone.

Nevertheless, I think it is no accident that the protagonist is an
»cco*#c6«#r,the 19focenturyversionoftoday’s obstetrician — ^whatman
better to beard a Goddess? And I also found it interesting that when foe
mystery of the nephelim is penetrated at foe end of the book, we find
at foe heart of foe evil a man who has usurped foe role of Woman; by
perversely filling his own belly with a child of stone, this creature makes
possible foe horrors that the protagonist and thousands of others have
suffered. Only Michael Crawford’s unique skills as an obstetricianmake
the undoing of foe blasphemy possible.

Gorgon, lamia, medusa. Muse . . . Powers gives us to understand
that these words are all related, and draws as many Jungian mythic
connections into his portrayal of the nephelim as possible. The Sphte
and the Grai* both make guest appearances in The Stress of Her R^terd,
in scenes pivotal to the plot. Every time we turn around, one of the
characters is invoking some new myth, drawing firom the trove of
emotional wisdom in an etfort to understand and cope with the
seductive enemy: Perseus, Balder, Prometheus, Adam, Christ every
redemptive legend is searched for some hint of salvation.

The Gorgon’s love is not at all reserved to poets; anyone who is
sensitive and pliable (and able to appreciate pleasure and death inextri-
cably entwined) is eUgible for the attention of the nephelim. Talent
simply makes the victim more attractive; it becomes more likely that the
assignation will be drawn out over time. The Stress of Her R^ardr^
give a pang to any and all who have ever been desperately in love with
an intense, seemingly irresistible and dangerously destructive person.
Anyone who has once given body and soul to a lover who cannot be
trusted with either may recognize themselves in Michael Crawford.

She held out to him a hand— it was slightly more like a
jeweled bird-claw than like a woman’s hand, but he remem-
bered it sliding langorously over his naked body four years
ago. and his heart was pounding with the desire to take it. The
music was doing arabesques around his rapid heartbeat now,
andhe thought he could almost remember the steps ofa dance
so ancient and wild that trees and rivers and stormstookapart
in it.

All of the characters in this book ate engaged, to one degree or
another, in a battle of two fronts— an external struggle with the machi-
nations of the nephelim. and an internal struggle against the passions
that these creatures of myth ate able to stir. It is hardly surprising that

Bibliography

Baudelaire: Flowers of Evil; “La Beautd.”

George Gordon. Lord Byron: Childe Httrolde’s PUgrimiige; Don
Juttn; Mwnfred; “She Walks in Beauty”; see also Thomas
Moore’s Letters tend Journals for some of the quotes I have used
here.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Christabel”; “The Pains of Sleep ; Phan-
tom."

John Keats: “Isabella”; “La Belle Dame Sans Merd”; “Lamia ; selected
letters.

they all begin so many sentences with the words “I wonder — passion
and reason are ancient enemies, and the ability to think around and
through the influence ofa vampire is the first step toward recovery firom
the addiction.

For all the awful beauty and strangeness that Powers has invested
in his lamiac, the parallels to real lovers in our own world ^e clear—
which may 1^ why his treatment of vampirism is so infinitely more
interesting and moving than the slick, meaninglessly feral power
fimtasies of Anne Rice and her imitators.

A great many of the characters in Stress come to a bad end
physically, but most of the deaths that occur onstage are suffused with
akind of glory. Stresshis some ofthe hideous strength possessed by the
Oedipus Cycle, or the Oresteia. Persons imwilling to sufer and soar
with a passel of tragic heroes should be advised; this is not a novel for
persons of weak liver.

It’s almost embarrassing to bring up the matter of transcendence
in a review; it is not an attribute so easy to quantify and discuss as a
book’s prose, or its research. I often hope to be clever in my criticism;
here I must dispense with cleverness — it is an affliction, an obstacle. I
can only say, humbly: I have seen Truth and Beauty here. I have been
moved.

In plainer words, a great many poets and writers have immortalized
women 'fAio savored more of brimstone than of ambrosia. Sometimes
the lyre and die scythe are wielded by the same hand; Tim Powers has
put his finger on a vein which has been pulsing with life for hundreds
of years. The Stress of Her Rejfurd.'f^ stand the longest in my mind as
a document ofthe relationship between man and Muse; it is beautiful
as a dream of stone.

Arinn Demho lives in Seattle, Wsuhington.
of Relevant Works:

Tim Powers: TheAnubis Gates; Dinner at Deviant^s Palace; The Draw-
ing ofthe Dark; On Stranger Tides; The Skies Discrowned; The Stress
of Her Regard.

William Shakespeare: Macbeth; Stotmsx 130 — “My mistress’ eyes. . . ”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein (see most particularly its
famous preface).

Percy Shelley: “Adonais”; “Alastor; or. The Spirit of Solitude”; Prom-
etheus Unbound; The Witch of Atlas.

Clark Ashton Smith; Nyctalops; Sphinx and Medusa.

The leading specialist in
SCIENCE FICTION
AND FANTASY LITERATURE
Phone Orders Welcome

— catalogues issued —

L. W. Currey, Inc.

Box 187, Elizabethtown, NY 12932
(518) 873-6477

The New York Review of Science Fiction 7

Through the Momus Glass

Continued from pu£e I

mechanical help wdiatever; — nor shall my pencil be guided by
any one wind instrument which ever was blown upon, either
on this, or on the other side of the Alps, — nor will I consider
either his repletions or his discharges, — or touch upon his
Non-Naturals; — but, in a word, I will draw my uncle Toby’s
character from his HOBBY-HORSE.

By “hobby-horse” Sterne meant not just a pastime, but an eccen-
tric activity or opinion carried to the point of obsession. Tlius in drawing
his characters from their hobby-horses Sterne exploded the conventions
of character portrayals almost before they were established . Although in
Tristram Shandy My Father, My Uncle Toby, and indeed Tristram
himself are very folly presented, they arc scarcely roimded characters in
Forster’s sense: they arc collections of eccentricities, “made strange,” as
the Russian F ormalist critic Viktor Shklovsky put it, by the view from the
hobby-horse. Moreover, alfrioughallofSteme’smajor characters, from
Tristram down to Corporal Trim, are dearly mad, lunacy is so evenly
distributed between My Father’s obsessive theorizing and My Unde
T oby’s sublime indifference to the world that it is hard to say which one
is craziest.

But everything I have said about Sterne could serve just as well to
describe the characters in a typical Bla)dock novel. This is particularly
true oiThe Di£igin^ leviathan, where the forces of good and the forces
of evil are equally eccentric. There is litde to choose, in point of mental
unbalance, between, say, the carp-obsessed Dr. Hilario Frosticos and
his adversary, the paranoid William Hastings, whose Qvilization The-
ory is tested through his attempts to acclimatize mice and axolotls to
wearing clothes. Equally important, Blalock characters are drawn, as in
Sterne, and as Blajdock promises in the epigraph to The Last Coin,
through their singular obsessions, their hobby-horses. In foct, we can
be even more specific. In virtually every Blaylock novd there arc two
characters corresponding to My Father and My Unde Toby. I have
already mentioned the artificers, best typified by William ^eble in
Homunculus, whose very beingis the fabrication of amazingly elaborate
miniature boxes. Kebble’s true spiritual forebear is notFaberg^ but My
Unde Toby, whose hobby-horse turned out to be his incredibly
elaborate system of model fortifications. Answering to My Father is the
Theorist: virtually every Blaylock novd contains someone addicted to
demented scientific or pscudo-sdentific theories, such as Hastings in
The Di£;ging Leviathan, Bill Kxaken in Homunculus, or Beams Pickett
in The Last Coin.

The passage about hobby-horses is the epigraph to The Last Coin
(it docs mention coins, but this is really secondary), which in many
ways is Blaylock’s most striking novd because of its departures from the
patterns I have described. In Homunculusmd The Dt£iging Leviathan,
nearly all the characters arc more or less equally eccentric. In The Last
Coin, by contrast, although the villainous Jiiles Pennyman has his
qxiirks, most of the book’s eccentricity is concentrated in the protago-
nist, Andrew Vanbergem. As Pennyman thinks, “[t]he man was a case
study in several of the more novd forms ofinsanity.” Indeed, there can
have been few characters since Tristram Shandy with more hobby-
horses, and Blaylock presents every ride. (Indeed, Andrew is one of the
few serious contenders for the Ignatius J. Reilly Award, given to the
craziest character in contemporary literature not invented by John
Kennedy Toole.) We are >»fr<7rf«r«rfto Andrew off-balance on a ladder
at midnight, trying to kidnap his aimt’s cats (for her own good, as he
thinks ) by enticing them into a sack hdd at the end of a pole . In case we
had hoped he would grow saner as the book progresses, we see him at
the beginning of Chapter 2 trying to convince his fiiend Beams Pickett,
through a plainly sophistical argument, that two cups of coflfee are equal
to one and a half, and then planning his scheme for smuggling Weetabix
from Canada, a plan predicated on his delusional belief that Weetabix
is contraband in the United States:

“Don’t use the truck. Iliey’d probably just confiscate the
crates of Weetabix at the boMer — spot them in a second.
They’d wonder what in the world a man is doing smuggling
Weetabix in an old pickup truck 'vvfoen he’s supposed to be in
Vancouver at a convention for writers of columns for the

8 The New York Review of Scierrce Fiction

lovelorn. The truck doesn’t run worth a damn anyway. Fill the
trunk of your car. That’ll be enough. We’ll make another run
somehow in a few months.” He paused for a moment and
thought. “I’ll pay for the gas.”

Andrew’s thought processes reflect another fevoritc technique of
Sterne’s, the rigorous reduction to absurdity of an innocuous situation.
The tec^que pervades Blaylock’s work. For example, consider the
passage in The Dt^gin^ Leviathan in which William Hastings observes
a mound of dog droppings on the lawn and insists on blaming his
neighbor, the hapless Mrs. Pembly:

“Look at that . . . What do you make of it? ”

“I’d say a dog has foimd his way into our back yard,” said
Edward skeptical. “I must have left the gate unlatched.”

WilUiam dashed from the room . . . “This isn’t a case of
an open gate. This is what I’ve been telling you about.”

“Ah,” said Edward, afraid it had come to that.

“The Pemblys, I’m certain of it, are playing their hand
here. This abomination has their filthy fingerprints all over it. ”

“It appears to me,” Edward said, mistal^g his meaning,

“tiiat the stuff is fobbed in what might be called its original
resting place. I’m certain we shouldn’t accuse the Pemblys
here. In fiict, I’m not at all sure what you’re suggesting.”
“They’ve thrown their dog over the fence to defecate on
our lawn; that’s what I’m suggesting.”

This remarkable theory of the Pembly’s perfidy is followed by a bizarre
practical suggestion that is nonetheless entirely logical given William’s
views:

“We will be as vigilant and deceptive as they are.”

“Ah,” said Uncle Edward.

“We’ll start by trimming the top of that big hibiscus
along the fence there. You see, ifit were a foot or so shorter,

I could stand here like so , against the line of the drape, and see
quite neatly into their living room. They’d take me for a pole
lamp.”

When Blaylock hits his stride any of his characters can go on like
this for pages at a time, and he is nowhere in stride so consistently as in
The last Coin.

Blaylock complements Stemean techniques by reference to an-
other En^sh consumptive. There is typically one character in a
Blaylock novel who is not eccentric and who is drawn in more or less
realistic feshion, almost always an adolescent or young adult: Jim
Hasting in The Dicing Leviathan, Jack Owiesby in Homunculus.
These more conventional characters partake of the world of Blaylock’s
other fevoritc source of epigraphs, Robert Louis Stevenson: ordinary
characters, often literally children, una-ware of the extraordinary people
and events surrounding them. (It’s hard not to draw a connection
bepvwn Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island and Jim Hastings of The
LHgging laviathan.) In feet, one way of appreciating Blaylock’s ori^-
nality is to think of him as reinventing ^e Stevensonian novel of
adventure , making it very strange by telling it in Sternean feshion. From
the Stevensonian character’s point of view, the action is a relatively
straightforward melodrama (it will be remembered that Jim Hastings is
seen reading Fu Manchu stories). In feet, one ofBlaylock’s novels. Land
ofLh-eams, is a relatively straightforward melodrama, which, fittingly
has three adolescent protagonists. The exception is again The Last
Andrew being Blaylock’s only wholly eccentric, Stemean pro-
tagonist. (Andrew has read Stevenson, however, as has Pennyman. ) It
appears that Blajdock has been systematically experimenting with his
protagonists. In The Dtggtng Leviathan and Homunculus Steven-
sonian figures arc marginal; in Land they take center stage;

and in The last Coin they disappear altogether. The Paper Grail will
criiibit anotiier variation.

Blaylock also has his own hobby-horses, recurring themes and
images in his work. For example, it is rare to see a Blaylock novel that
does not contain a sly dig at science fiction itself. The most obvious
example is the story WJJiam Hastings sells to Analog ( “who would, he
insisted, appreciate the scientific accuracy”); but Blaylock is even

Read This

Recently read and recommended by Stizy McKee Chamas:

A Woman of the Iron People, Eleanor Amason, 'William Mor-
row, 1991. A cool, witty sf book about a race more freshly
descended from its animal ancestors than ours and wrestling
closely with the hangovers of instinctive behavior, particularly
between the sexes. Good work.

Through a Brazen Mirror, Delia Sherman, Ace, 1989. A very
handsome fantasy novel with unusual flavor and delicacy — see
Donald Keller’s article on “the fantasy ofmanners” in NTRSF
#32, April 1991 . He liked the book, and I did too.

A Case of Knives, Candia McWilliam, Ballantine, 1988. A
“mystery, ” or so marketed (it’s much more like a really elegant
monster-story), of exquisitely observed and pointed charac-
ter; compelling and poignant reading. I think this is a genuine
tour dc force. The resolution is somewhat blurred, which
doesn’t matter a damn.

High Albania, Edith Durham, first published in 1909. The
edition I have is from Virago press, their “Travellers” scries,
and it is a delight — an accoimt by one of those doughty British
ladies who went where they damn well pleased, in friis case
through one of the most primitive comers of Europe (then as
now). She loved the place extrawgantly (and its people loved
her in return and made her their adopted “Queen"). None-
theless, she wrote with tart and bracing intelligence of the
barbarity ofthc place and its society. Wonderful and astound-
ing.

Akenfield, Portrait of an Engli^ Village, by Ronald Blythe;
Pantheon, 1980. This is a modem classic ofrecentvintage. An
absolutely gorgeous feast of voices speaking the truth of life
and change in a small rural town near London.

Period Piece, by Gwen Raverat, W. W. Norton, 1952. The
author, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin, whtes of her
childhood in her eminent family of Victorian Cambridge.
Full of absorbing detail, good sense, humor, and wiiat it
takes to bring a distant time and place to fascinating life on
the page.

The Hell-Bent Kid, Charles O. Locke. The yellowing copy I
have is from Pan Books, ages old; but it’s well worth himting
for. This is (gasp) a Western, but what a Western — simple,
strong, and deeply felt, a powerful meditation on one of the
centrsd myths of Ae American past.

Paintedin Blood: Understanding Europeans, by Stuart Miller,
Macmillan, 1987. Hard to find but well worth it — Miller lived
in Europe for years with his Belgian wife, and his reflections
on the differences between the formative experiences of
modem Europeans and those of Americans make a splendid
study in society building and “contact” problems.

The Old and New Testaments, by "Whomever and published
right and left; the works, from beginning to end. If you
haven’t read this (as I hadn’t) because the words on the page
put you to sleep, try one of the several recorded versions (I’ve
been listening wMe doing exercise). Much of our civilization
is rooted in this document one way or another, and I am
stunned to discover that Volume One, at any rate, reads
largely like the ravings — a relentless flood of threats and
bribes, with threats preponderant — of a criminally abusive
parent, dutifully recorded by the terrifled offipring; and
Volume Two strikes me (so far) as good stuffbadly bent by the
iron fist of propaganda. Often highly unpleasant going, but
enlightening too.

capable, in the unlikely setting of Homunculus, of calling a scientific
paper “Time Considered As a Succession ofSemi-aosed Doors.” The
satire is typically more subtle and pervasive, though: there is an awfiil lot
of slime and several amphibious creatures in The Digging Leviathan, all
reminiscent of Lovecraft (for confirmation, there is the “Lovecrafiian”
Surinam toad in The Last Coin) . It is also unusual not to find a strange
outmoded car: Blaylock’s favorite is the Metropolitan, which appears
in both The Last Coin iiid The LHgging Leviathan {zhookhlcssed ■with
two weird cars, the other being a Hudson Wasp).

A final pervasive feature of Blaylock’s writing is his penchant for
slapstick. Blaylock is a highly visual writer, and the sheer silliness of
much of the physical action sneaks up on the reader ^o doesn’t pause
to visualize Ae action regularly.

T&tfP»p«rGr»»/exhibitsnearlyallofthcfeaturesIhavementioned.
Howard Barton, the protagonist, is an assistant museum curator from
Los Angeles come north (the wrong direction for a quest, according to
Thomas Pynchon) to obtain the Hoku-sai, which its possessor, one
Michael Graham, had promised him years ago. Not coincidentally,
Howard is also there to visit his Unde Roy and his cousin and not quite
requited love Sylvia.

Almost as soon as he sees a pelican which he recogni^s as symbolic
(though we aren’t told whether he knows that it’s a traditional symbol
of Christ), things are made strange for Howard. Arriving in the north
country, he is greeted by the book’s first Weird Car — ^a ghostly VWbus
belonging to the “gluers," redusive nature feddists \^ho get their name
because they glue detritus, such as seashells or toys, all over their cars.
(Because we have seen Howard buying bumper stideers to plaster over
his car, we recognize him as a gluer at heart, working in two dimen-

sions.) Relations with Sylvia are awkward, those with Uncle Roy are
peculiar: Graham is absent and his house is occupied by a caretaker, an
exceptionally bizarre person known as Mr. Jimmers. The first true
eccentric ofthe book, Jimmers is the character with the bizarre theories.
Not only is he convinced of UFO visitation, he believes that there is a
chalice-shaped constellation that we can only see edge on, but that is
going to turn toward us soon. . . .

Meanvriule, we are introduced to the villainous Heloise Lamey,
first seen visiting San Francisco and a certain Reverend White, tele-
preacher and defrocked surgeon, who has procured for her what he
represents are the armbones of Joseph of Arimathea, and who is her
agent in a search for the remains of John Ruskin.

Returning to Graham’s house, Howard is imprisoned by Jimmers,
who daims that Graham is dead— ^at he was driving the Studebaker
How^d has earlier seen squashed on a dolmen on the beach below the
house. (The Studebaker is ejqiressly identified as a Weird Car: “The
public ridiculed a Studebaker, largely because it had a front end you
couldn’t tell from the rear; it w^ a sort of mechanical push-me pull-
you”)

TJnde Roy is in straits (our first inkling that Howard might have
heroic tendendes is his rescue of Uncle Roy from a foreclosure attempt
by Mrs. Lamey by posing as a lawyer), having gone bankrupt trying to
establish a Museum of Modem Mysteries (largely, in Howard’s view,
because of Roy’s quixotic faith in his vision of a Studebaker full of
ghosts). Howard and Sylvia’s visit to this haunted house, after a
disastrous dinner at which Sylvia turns out to be a devotee of New Age
concepts, goes badly, but next morning Howard discovers that
Michael Graham is alive, hiding in the woods.

With Graham’s appearance the subtext becomes manifest. There

The New York Review of Science Fiction 9

has been intermittent grail imagery^ before this point — the pelican at the
beginning, Mr. Jimmers’s g^-shaped constellation. Now, as the
reader might have guessed, it turns out that the Hoku-sai is in fact the
Grail (the patterns result from its having caught Christ’s blood from the
Cross, where it was folded into a cup by Joseph of Arimathea). Michael
Graham is the Fisher King (lending new significance to the question
b oth Jimmers and Uncle !^y have asked Howard, “Are you a man v4io
likes to fish?”), making Uncle Roy and Jimmers Grail Knights, and
Sylvia and Roy’s wife Edith “tent maidens,” as Roy explains, in a
blizzard of nautical metaphor, to a thoroughly befuddled Howard. As
soon as Howard thiis learns that he has been summoned to become the
new keeper of the Grail, the sketch is apparently accidentally destroyed
by Jimmers. Then, in a startling development, Howard discovers that
the shed on Graham’s property that Jimmers keeps xmder lock and key
contains a Victorian machine (later said to have been invented by
TOUiam Keeble of Homunculus) capable of summoning the spirit of
John Ruskin (himself apparently a former Fisher King, a fact ^^hich
would, as Heloise Lamey speculates, account for his well-known
impotence).

On returning to the house Howard surprises and diverts two thugs
of Mrs. Lamey’s who are looking for the grail. He then finds Jimmers,
who, believing that Howard’s position is compromised, suggests an
amazing course of action:

We’ll smuggle you up to the Little River airport and fly you
out in a private plane — ^to Oakland, ■where you can catch a
commercial jet to Los Angeles. You can’t return to work, of
course, or to your living quarters, but I can’t imagine Aat
you’ll suflfer any for that. It’s possible that we can arrange
some litde stipend to see you over.

Having casually discarded Howard’s previous life as thoroughly as any
witness location specialist, Jimmers continues:

Anyway, straight off you’ll send someone in to steal your
dental records. . . . No, cancel that. Forget the dental records.
We’ve got a corpse, don’t we? We’ll break its teeth out. Wait!
Better than that, and easier, we’ll cut offits head. To hell with
dental records. Don’t bother yourself with them. This is
foolproof.

Luckily, this plan comes to nothing,

Jimmers’s shed — ^the entire shed, including the machine — is kid-
napped and then rescued in a daring raid. After a confrontation with
Mrs. Lamey, Graham dies and Howard, in token ofhis succession, takes
Graham’s walking stick, which we recognize as the Fisher King’s staff.
This is perhaps a little convenient in terms of plot, because the stick fells
into Mr. Lamey’s hands that night when Howard keeps an appoint-
ment to attend a “salon” of Mrs. Lamey’s featuring her henchmen —
Reverend White, the deconstructionist thug Glenwood Touchey, and
an excremental poetess significantly named Gwendolyn Bundy, who
has had her Mensa card laminated — and from which he manages to
escape, retrieving the staff, only by blowing up her washing machine
with a cherry bomb and, later, crashing a channeling session, with
hilarious resiilts.

At last, Howard is ready to find the real sketch (for of course what
Jimmers destroyed was a copy), which he does, in the crashed Stude-
baker on the beach. The results are startling: by folding the sketch
without knowing what he’s doing, Howard calls a storm out ofthe vasty
deep that he is neariy unable to put down. But this is enou^ to alert
Mrs. Lamey to the feet that Howard has the sketch, and to get it she
resorts to desperate measures — kidnapping Uncle Roy (and Aunt
Edith, who goes offin search of him) . Her ransom demand--^eir lives
in exchange for the sketch — sets off a final confrontation with Howard
that only ends in Jimmers’s shed in the presence of Ruskin’s ghost.

All this shows that The Paper Grailj then, is a distinct development
out of Blaylock’s earlier novels. It more closely resembles The Last Coin
than it does any other Blajdocknovel. Both books feature a quest object
of Biblical provenance, and a villain seeking that object who approxi-
mates evil incarnate. That docs not mean, of course, that The Paper

10 The New York Review of Science Fiction

Read This

Recently read and Recommended by Larry Niven:

Like the World of Tiers, P hilip Jose Farmer’s early stories
were often built in multiple layers.

Thus Red Orc^s Ra^e is something old and new. It’s
not just a “World of Tiers” novel; it’s a fictional readcr’s-eye
view of the “World of Tiers” universe being used for group
therapy!

That part seems real. A. James Giannini, M.D.,
F.CA..P., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Ohio State
University, invented the technique. My advance uncorrected
proofr came with several pages by Giannini describing his
methods.

In Farmer’s canon, Red Ore is one of the universe-
building Lords; he built the Earth universe. But our pro-
tagonist is Jim Grimson, given as fictional: a mental patient
who has been encouraged to dip into Red Ore’s life as a means
of vmderstanding and curing hmself. So we get a life of Red
Ore too.

Grailis in any way a rehash of The Last Coin; rather, it is thematically
closest to that book, its immediate predecessor.

The experimentation with protagonists continues. Howard begins
as a Stevensonian protagonist grown older — about thirty. But unlike
the earlier Stevensonian figures such as the children in Land of Dreams
or Jim Hastings in The Dipigin^ L^iathan, How^d develops as the
book progresses, losing his Stevensonian naivefe. Of course, he does so
by easing further and further into the ambient lunacy until he becomes
a fusion of Stevensonian and Stemean tendencies. Perhaps every Jim
Hastings is feted to grow into a William. The feet remains that Howard
is the first protagonist in Blaylock who lanites these disparate character
strands.

The diference between theorist and artificer is also blurred. Mr.
Jimmers, with his strange views about flat constellations and flying
saucers, is evidently the Aeorist of the book, but he is revealed to be a
closet glucr: the basement of Graham’s home shelters a flying saucer
(which, as S)dvia observes, can ironically never go anywhere) he has
constmeted and decorated with tin toys in gluer fashion. Thus, he is an
artificer as well. And the official artificer of the book. Uncle Roy’s fiiend
Bennet, who lives across the street from Mrs. Lamey and infuriates her
coterie with his assemblages of wooden toys and flora, is a theorist, who
puts his unique views to effective practical use:

“I’ve been studying numbers,” he said.

Uncle Roy nodded in assent. “He’s going to crack the
lottery."

“It’s something I call the Principle of Universal Attrac-
tion. Numbers are jmt like people . . . You dump them in a box
and away they go, searching out someone to have a chat with.

. . . [HJerc comes number forty-three, sitting down with with
number eighteen, and then number six and number eight,
maybe . . .The trickis to watch them, figure out who itis that’s
attracting who.”

The balance of eccentricity is better maintained than in Blaylock’s
earlier novels, as well. Howard by his very nature must combine
eccentricity with normality, but this is true of all the other major
characters: of Uncle Roy, daft in everything but his love for Edith and
Sj^via; of Sylvia, down to earth in everything but her New Age beliefi;
even of Jimmers, who is revealed to have a hidden emotional life we
could not attribute to, say, William Hastings (in spite of the death ofhis
wife, which does have an effect on the Stevensonian Jim); and even of
Mrs. Lamey, who is portrayed rather more sympathetically than her
predecessor Pennyman in The last Coin. (Mrs. Lamey is almost literally
Pennyman’s successor; roughly halfway through the book she has a

dream about being thrown from a pier by a gigantic fish, directly linking
her with Pennyman’s final fete.)

Thus, in The Pa-per Grail Blaydock achieves rounder characters
than he previoxisly had, without sacrificing the loopiness that is his
trademark. He also develops rather elaborate patterning effects. The
most striking instance is his tise of the Humpty Dumpty motif.
Humpty Dumptys in various sizes and media appear in a remarkable
variety of places: there are several at Graham’s house, one in Aunt
Edith’s kitchen, a huge wooden wind-powered one crowning
Bennet’s house and infuriating Mrs. Lamey’s henchmen no end (we
knowthey are irredeemable when, after the salon, they attack Bennet’s
Humpty Dumpty), another, as if in counterpoint, glued to Jimmers’s
flying saucer, one at a gluer shrine Howard discovers just before he
learns that Graham is aSve, and at least one in Howard’s dreams. In
short, virtually every character on the side of good is associated with a
physical Humpty Dumpty at some point or other. If any doubt
remained that Humpty Dumpty becomes a symbol wryly coextensive
with the Grail, it is put to rest by Roy’s comment in the conversation
that ensues when we and Howard are first introduced to Bennet:
“We’re the king’s men, aren’t we? Isn’t that what I told you? The
circle’s been broken. We mean to put the pattern in order .” The “king’s
men” arc the gluers, whose ranks, as S)4via explains to Howard, turn
out to include both Jimmers and Roy:

“Uncle Roy is a closet ^uer?”

“I think it has something to do with knowing Graham.”

“With this, I think,” Howard said, waving the copper

case.

“Father refers to it as the Humpty Dumpty complex, the
desire to always be putting things back together.”

To put things back together is the role of the artificer, of course, so that
we can sec Blalock himself, the artificer behind the scenes, as having the
Humpty Dumpty complex.

Tlie Paper Grail has many other virtues on which I have not
touched, not least of which is Blaylock’s sensitivity to landscape, a
feature of his writing that is not shown to best advantage in, say. The
Di£^n^ Leviathan or The Last Coin, both of which are set in Southern
California. Tikp Land of Dreams, The Paper Grail is set north of San
Francisco, in the real coastal towns of Fort Bragg and Mendocino,
enabling Blaylock to evoke the mist-shrouded Pacific Coast Highway,
the meadow behind Roy’s house where Graham is hiding, or Inglcnook
Fen, a lovely wild spot wantonly destroyed by Mrs . Lamey in a test ofher
power, with equal vividness and fedlity. In all, this is possibly Blaylock’s
best-realized novel. ^

James Cappio lives in Brooklyn, New Tork.

Brain Child by George Turner

New York: William Morrow, May 1991 : $20.00 he; 407 pages

reviewed by Brian Stableford

George Turner’s fifih sf novel, presumably written while he was in
his seventy-fifth year, continues to pick away at various themes which
have preoccupied him since Beloved Son (197S): problematic aspects of
paternal responsibility and filial loyalty; the genetic engine^g of
super humanity; the seductive allure of immortality. This continuity is
not surprising; old men rarely acquire new hangups. Turner’s view of
all these things is sour and contemptuous and gloomy, belonging
solidly to the “no good will come of it all” school of speculation. This
also will not surprise those who arc familiar with the author’s earlier
works , and the snidely destructive Hterary criticism at which he was once
so adept; he has always suffered from a surfeit of bile.

In essence , Brain Childis a revisitation of the philosophical themes
of Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John, with appropriate textual acknowl-
edgements. Oddjohnwis itsclfa revisitation ofthemes first explored in
John Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder, which also inspired E.V.
Odle’s The Clockwork Man, so Brain Child may claim close kinship with
the very best of British scientific romance. It is, however, adapted to the
norms and expectations of today’s literary marketplace— which is to say
that it is heavily padded to help it sit more stoutly on the shelf; and
formatted as a detective story-cum-spy thriller, complete with bugs,
disguises and a gratuitous car chase, in order that it may maintain an \m-
comfortable fefade of orthodox narrative tension. Its ongoing attempt
to obtain a melodramatic pitch of excitement by insisting that its chief
narrator is subject to a constant confusion of pick-and-mix emotional
agonies might irritate some readers, but conventional editorial wisdom
is nowadays insistent in the belief that readers will not pay attention
unless they are being shouted at, so the more contemplative reader w^
simply have to learn to screen such things out, or abandon Brain Chtld
in fevor of rereading Odd John.

The age-old problem of the sub-genre still remains, of coxirse.
How is a mere human supposed to approach the logically- impossible
task ofimagining and describing a hypothetical superman? The answer,
inevitably, remains the same: make all plausible headway with a portrait
of an astonishingly precocious child, and then do a deft snow job,
presenting the nascent adult as something essentially incomprehen-
sible. The superman at the center of Turner’s novel, Conrad “Young
Feller” Hazard, is long dead before the narrator sets out in quest ofthe
mysterious legacy which he left behind, so we are never brought fece-

to-fecc with him in the way that the narrators of Beresford’s and
Stapledon’s novels were, but tihis circumspectionis in some ways helpful,
and the cheating is ameliorated by the feet that we given abimdant
opportunity to view his slightly-less-super kin. Turner’s attempts to
imagine suj>emess are broadly conventional, though Conrad’s reper-
toire of fancy tricks includes an intriguing supcr-seductivencss, and his
legacy turns out to be interestingly encoded in a kind of super -artwork.
I foimd all this difficult to swallow, in the absence of any convincing
explanation as to how such tricks might work, but the conventional
accoutrements of superhumanity (hypnotic gaze, ultra -rapid absorption
of information, etc.) are just as difficult to accoxmt for, and the author
is probably entitled to fall back on the tmanswerable argument that flic
superhuman must, by definition, baffle the merely human mind.

The chief problem with Brain Child, I thiiik, is that it has not
advanced its thinking beyond the conclusion of The Hampdenshire
Wonder, which was published five years before Turner was bom. There,
with the eponymous Wonder safely dead, the country squire laconically
remarks that h umans are children in the infency ofthe world, and ought
to be content to play in the nursery of their own time. Stapledon could
not be satisfied with that, cventhougji Odd JohntndiS wifli Ae same kind
of mass-suicide that features in Brain Child; nor could Beresford, who
revisited his theme again, rather more constructively, in ^What Dreams
May Come — ** nor could Odle, who foimd a better dream to contrast
with the sad ni^tmarc ofthe clockwork man; and nor — even at the age
of 72 — could M. P. Shiel in his gloriously ambitious last novel of
burgeoning superhumanity The Toung Men Are Coming. I cannot
count it to Turner’s credit that he can be satisfied with a bitter refusal
to believe that our best efforts to improve upon tiic legacy of natural
selection can possibly amount to anytiiing. It is at best curmudgeonly,
and at worst cowardly.

Turner’s eventual casual extinction ofthe legacy which his charac-
ters spend so much rime and effort chasing is excused with a rhetoric
which would surely have seemed tired even in the dark days of the 1920s
when the ambitions of pre-&eat War scientific romance had been
shattered. To find a contemporary writer woffling about superhumans
being bom “out of their time” and concludingthat engineered immor-
tality is impossible because evolution is a “system” which requires death
in order to function is rather sad. It is suggestive not merely of a woefifl

The New York Review of Science Fiction 1 1

misunderstanding of the theory of evolution by natural selection, but
also of a curiously sentimental view of ordinary humanity.

Even in 1911, in a world still beset by many post-Victorian
illusions, John Beresford was conscious of the fiict that a total lack of
concern for the welfiure of others was not a trait confined to hypothetical
supermen, but something all too common among human beings.
George Turner seems to know it too — despite the apologetic remarks
offered on behalf of the mercurial Jonescy I fiuled to find a single
sympathetic character, human or superhuman, in the entire book — but
somehow he contrives to cling to the notion that if only man refi’ained
firom tampering with things he didn’t ought to, all fathers might love
their chili'en and there might be a drastic shortage of manipulative,
cunning bastards who regard their fellow men as cattle ripe for e:q)loi-
tation. History does not bear this out — ^nor, I suspect, does George
Turner’s own experience of ordinary human life (or did he acquire his

awful burden of bile by virtue of genetic engineering?).

Perhaps, at the end ofthc day, all Turner means to tell us is that we
have made such a mess of the world already that greater scientific
expertise would only guarantee that we made things worse — but if he
does, then the climax of his book is surely more ironic than he intends,
because the character in the story with whom he is in closest agreement
on that^oint is not his confused and emotionally-unbalanced narrator
but his suicidal superman.

If this were so, it would not be the first time. Perhaps all of those
who claim so ardently to be on the side of humanity against the bleak
utilitarianism of hypothetical superhumanity betray themselves in the
end by protesting just a little too much.

Brian SmbUJbrd^s most recent books are The Empire of Fear and
Werewolves ofLondon.

Candas Jane Dorsey

Deconstructing Deconstructing Vietnam

When I began to read The Healer^s War by Elizabeth Ann
Scarborough, I had to grapple with its curious narrative mixture of
violence and disengagement. The combination of immediate horror
and distancing description wos very odd.

Although I reviewsfbooks as part ofmy professional activity, I wu
reading this book mostly because a close fiiend, Sharon Grant, ^^o like
ScarboroughwasonceanurscinVietnam,wouldnotreaditherself,but
wanted to know what it was like.

After a few dozen pages, I turned fi-om Scarborough’s book to
Sharon’s: Dreams that Banish Sleep, an as-yet -unpublished documen-
tary account ofher year in^^etnam, reconstructed firom the small diary
she kept at the time.

If I had not known for years that tiic book existed, and if Sharon
had not gone home to get it and returned immediately, I would have
suspected her of drafting the manuscript overnight, as a non-fiction
mirror of Scarborougji’s book, in response to my request to see it. The
similarities are imcanny.

But there is another reason why this was not possible. Sharon has
never revisited Vietnam except in her memory and this manuscript. She
refused to go to Apocalypse Now, Tull Metal Jacket, Platoon, Good
Morning Vietnam, or Bom on the Four^ ofjttiy- She goes to some
lengths to avoid watching China Beach. For many years she has not read
books about Vietnam — hence her request to me to check out The
Healer^s War.

Sharon is a Canadian now, as I am, but she chose Canada. One of
what Gustav Hasford (whose short story “The Short-Timers” became
Full Metal Jacket) calls, in the dedication to his book The Phantom
Blooper, “three million [Americans] betrayed by their country,” she
decided to become a dtizen here many years after her experience in
Vietnam. The decision was part of the process of life healing which
includes the continued making of Dreams That Banish Sleep.

Sharon Grant and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough are Real Writers:
that is, driven to make art out of life, however long the process takes
(and however much it hurts). In their books, the two arc alike in three
other ways: their desire to make sense of their Vietnam experience; the
length of time it has taken them to produce a coherent narrative from
that ejqjerience; and the difficulty they have even now, twenty years
later, arriving at an immediacy of voice.

It is very odd to be a Canadian watching the USA deconstruct the
myths and reality of Vietnam, especially ^en I am also watching
Sharon do the same thing on both a personal and creative level. Canada
was a haven for those who objected to the war. Sf readers will know, for
instance, that Judy Merril made the same choice as Sharon but back in
1967, when she left the US because ofher objections to their policies
about Vietnam; Judy has now been a Canadian citizen for about twenty
years . Other fiiends and acquaintances were draft dodgers and deserters
from the US: a laid-back hippie mechanic in the Slocan vaDey; the
Reverend of the True light Church; a hip health-food capitalist who
chain-smoked Beaddies--^ this vm many years ago. And the voicc-

1 2 The New York Review of Science Fiction

over to it all is Jesse Vfinchestcr singing, “That’s why I like Lester B . —
poor man’s fnend . . .”

Now, according to the mass media from the US which dominate
the Canadian marketplace, Vietnam is the hip guilt to bear. Only, we
don’t feel so guilty up here. Twenty years ago we had a different
relationship to our government and society than Americans had to
theirs. When Abbie Hoffinan came to the University of Alberta in
Edmonton, he adapted his rallying cry of “Fuck Amerika! ” to his venue,
and started his speech with “Fuck Kanada!” He was booed. It meant
something quite different here. Which historical differences make it
possible to look at the quality of the atonement andxht level of creative
achievement — the process and the product, something that many
people, including artists, in the U.S. seem to be too confused, too angry,
too hurt — in short, too close to the feet — to do.

For those so close to the material, it is often enough to have done
anything at all with it. There is such a strong didactic, or at least
moralistic, presence in most of the media presentations ofVletnam that
it is obvious that process, not product, is still of most importance.

Not that this is necessarily a bad trend, if one believes as I do in
making a new kind of art which recognizes process as weD as produa.
But it is as fellacious to stress only process as it is to concentrate on the
produrt alone. (The former gives us the New York school of formalist
painting — ^infer my opinion of same from context — and the latter allows
monsters like Wagner to be considered great.)

Sharon and Scarborough have been going through their creative
processes at the same time as the USA has been indulging in this
prolonged process of scab-picking over Vietnam. If ontogeny and
phylogeny are mutually recapitulative here, the process is analogous to
the period of time life takes, according to Robert Burdette Sweet in
Writing Toward Wisdom: The Writer as Shaman, to submerge in the
subconsciousness and re-emerge as Art. I would like to extend Sweet by
saying that instead of assigning an arbitrary seven years (a tiiri e related
to how long the body takes to renew its cells) to tiiis time period, it is
more accurate to say that the process takes longer the harder the
experiences are: Vietnam, with its surreal, illogical, guilt-, anger- and
pain -ridden surroimd, is thus particularly hard to rationalize, for every-
day living purposes let alone creation.

This truism has been the biuden of the argument which has
impelled all those movies mentioned above, and more; it impells Grant
and Scarborough. As John Gardner points out, writing is a way of
processing reality. Sharon and Scarborough arc doomed to write it over
imtil it makes sense. Since it will never really make sense, the task is
Sissyphean.

However, they keep trying. The Healer^s War won the Nebula.
Removing for a moment consideration of the collective American
impulse to lionise those art-making heroes who even grapple wilh the
guilt and pain ofVietnam, whether or not they succeed, we must assume
thatatleastenoughpeoplctomake the nomination liked Scarborough’s
attempt. Grant has just taken out her manuscript again, to return to fece

those parts she fictionalized (names and characterizations, mainly) and
to begin die next overlay of interpretation and perspcetive.

Unlike Scarborough’s Kitty, Sharon Grant’s younger self had no
magic amulet to heal those around her or herself. It has t^en Gr^t
twenty years to write and live herself to this point — ^the point of being
able to fece another layer of the truth: and some days she still can’t bear
the smell of nuc nam when we go to the local Vietnamese restaurant. I
imagine Scarborough has the same reaction pattern.

Hence the odd voice shared by these two books, a voice which was
to me the most disquieting part of both. It is for the most part such a
distant, sane, linear, logical narrative voice (despite amulet or atrocity)
that it seems to disbelieve its own material. And attempts at self-
criticism, though honestly begun, have not yet managed to force either
writer through the paper wall.

In her diary, Sharon Grant wrote ofhowshc could not write letters
home. Scarborough develops a blackly humorous sequence when
Kitty, marooned in the jungle with a Vietnamese child amputee after
their chopper is shot down, and discovered and now guided by an
insane GI, composed a letter to her mother (“Dear Mom ... a fiinny
thing happened on die way to the hospital . . . the darned chopper
went down . . .”). But ironically both these (talented) writers’s efforts
to tell their stories (at whatever level of disguise afforded by fiuitasy
amulets or fictionalized characters) read a bit Uke the same type of letter
home. Dear reader: Vietnam scared my sense of order so profoundly
that I still can’t really talk about it much— a bit here and there, as much

plot as I can muster, but the self-hate, the fear, the surrealism — no, I
don’t think I want to show you that just yet — it’s enough for now just
to show you that it existed.

Yet both books are extraordinarily vivid. If they both seem curi-
ously limited, that too recapitulates a reality: muses in Vietnam were
almost completely penned up: Sharon spent 5 months in an area of one
square mile. (And when they got out, by the way, they fbimd that the
world did not believe in them. One officer’s wife in Bangkok treated a
colleague of Grant’s, there on leave, as if she were a prostitute. She
couldn’t imderstand what else a noncombatant women would be doing
in a war zone. And one of the common responses to ex-\^etnam nurses
was: “But no women served in Vietnam!”) Their slang, their jargon,
their on-duty experience with bureaucracy and the banality of horror,
their off-duty experiences as feir game for officers who were “geographic
bachelors” are all so similar as to seem imitative.

Then who are they imitating? Certainly not each other. Sharon, as
I said, refuses to read books about Vietnam, watch movies or TV about
Vietnam, and even, some years, to mention having been there. She is in
little danger ofbeing corrupted by secondary sources . I suspect Scarb or-
ough is the same.

So who? And why?

Maybe the next layer of the deconstruction wiU eventually reveal
the answers.

Candas Jane Dorsefs recent book w Machine Sex and Other Stories.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction:

Eighth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991; $27.95 hc$15.95 tp; 613 pages

reviewed by Leonard Rysdyk

One ofthe good things about science fiction is that it can be “best”
in many diferent ways. Gardner Dozois’ ThelTear^s Best Science Fiction:
Eighth Annual Collection presents a diversity of bests from the lightly
humorous “Walking the Moons” by Jonathan Lethem to the Sopho-
dean “The Death Artist” by Alexander Jablokov. There is a definite
trend toward the serious and the literary in this collection with a slant
toward ftishionable post-modernism and for the most part this is a good
thing. It is interestingto note thatthere is very little that is or even seems
to be “good old science fiction” — indeed only one story takes place in
outer space — ^and this also is mostly a good thing. On the down side, the
stories tend more toward sdence fentasy and the pleasure of manipulat-
ing images than toward science fiction and its sturdy, but often limited,
problem-solving plots . Writers who pursue this esthetic, like contempo -
rary mainstream writers, put themselves in danger of becoming merely
precious, fenciful and the literary equivalent of Chinese food — ^tasty and
exotic, but unsatisfying over the long haul. For the most part, though,
the stories in this collection are positively influenced by their literary
models and informants and so most of them enjoy the hybrid vigor that
is often found when genre lines are interbred. Alesson I believe we were
taught by Shakespeare.

One of the things most people would expect from sf is weird
images, and this type of writing is most strongly represented in the first
story in the anthology, James Patrick Kelly’s “Mr. Boy.” Its proUgonist
is a twenty-five year old whose growth has been stunted twice — for
esthetic reasons— so that his body is still only twelve years old. His best
friend is a thirteen year old dinosaur (a stenonychosaurus, to be exact)
and his mother is the Statue of liberty— not the real one, of course, but
a three-quarter scale model; that’sall the city frthers ofNewCanaan, CT
would permit. Ivir. Boy actually lives inside his mother and talks to
various cyborg presentations of her, the Greeter, the Nanny, etc., while
her actual presence resides coolyinthchead. Pretty w^cky, huh? Once
the situation is introduced, thou^, the plot is what one would expect.
Mr. Boy meets a girl and decides he needs his independence; it’s time
to growup. The real strength ofthe story, aside from the wildly amazing
scenario, is in its climax, where Mr. Boy ascends his mother’s spiral
staircase and forces his way into the sanctum sanctorum of her crown.

There he expects to find her living in some form, but instead finds the
cryogenic components of a supercomputer room. His mother has
downloaded her personality; she is dead. As Mr. Boy pounds on the
door of his mother’s brain, ail the old reactions to similar scenes from
good old science fiction well up in the reader’s mind — here is John
Carter poimding on the door of the oxygen factory in A Princess of
Mars, the time traveller pounding on the doors of die Sphinx or even
Maddeine Usher beating on the doors of her own tomb — a conven-
tionally scary moment. But something else is going on too . This is not
just an encounter with the current power figure, Dorothy confronting
Oz. There are real Oedipal overtones here. One does not merely feel
excited, but strange and alerted to more than mere plot thrills . Mr. Kelly
has exceeded the limits of his conventional coming-of-age story and —
through his images — given us a new and not entirely describable
esthetic chill, and most admirably, one that would not be possible in
anything other than a sdence fiction setting. Because this is sf, the
situation must be taken literally; the genre’s possibilities arc utilized to
overcome the genre’s usual limitations.

Other stories that shock through images include Alexander
Jablokov’s “Hie Death Artist” which envisions a world of dones, each
of whom can inhabit a body altered to fentastic shapes. In it, the
protagonist is a man who does not know that he was once his own sister .
His mother was once his fiither and the sister he does not remember he
was has been killed. Whodunit? Of course, none other than he himself.
Again, the pleasure of this story comes not from its plot, but first from
its images and second from its deep, almost mythical resonances . True,
some details are fudged, particularly the rules surroimding doning and
one feels a lack of understanding of the characters’ motivations. For
example, the mother states that she was a woman imprisoned in a man’s
body, but there is nothing to convince us of the reality of this; similarly,
the main character is consumed with hatred for his sister, but again,
there is no motivation — ^what did his sister ever do to him? The story
aims more for effect than imderstanding, but this is its only flaw. This,
even more than “Mr. Boy,” has the feeling of a Sophodean family
tragedy. It goes beyond weird to something mystical.

So does “Learning to be Me” by Greg Egan. This is a story about

The New York Review of Science Fiction 13

Read This

Recently read and Recommended by Fememdo jQ, Gouvea:

The Wizurd^s Tidcy by Frederick Buehner (Harper & Row)
This is a short novel about a femily tragedy that uses
The Wizard ofOz as a basic metaphor to ejqplore the possi-
bility of hope beyond Hope. While Buechner is knwn as a
humorist, this book is actually quite poignant, and ofers an
interesting example of how the Oz books have become
cultural icons in our time.

Reason for Sein^, by Jacques Ellul (Eerdman)

The French sociologist Jacques Ellul is well known in
some circles as the author of The Technological Society and
other scathing critiques of modernity in general and of the
modem fascination with technology in particular. Here he
puts on his other hat, and writes as a Qiristian intellectual
about the book of Ecclesiastes. His analysis is pretty much
sure to infuriate a lot of people, from Bible scholars to
feminist idealogues, but he give us a fascinating e}qploration
of one of the strangest books in the the Bible.

Brazilian Journal^ by P. K Page (Lester & Orpen Dennys)
Canadian poet P. K. Page lived in Brazil with her
husband, who was the Canadian ambassador for a fow years
in the late fifties. Her journal, published thirty years later,
offers a fascinating picture of a foreigner faUing in love with

Brazilian culture. At the same time, a comparison between
wbat she describes and modem Brazil offers a classic example
of the costs of “modernization.”

Journey through Genius, by William Dunham (Wiley)

Popular books on mathematics tend to be pretty bad, but
this one is better than most. It is a tour through several great
theorems ofmathematics, with an eye to the personal and social
world of their creators. To be accessible to the general reader,
Dunham concentrates mainly on older material (five out of
twelve chapers are about ancient Greek mathematics), but he
manages to convey some of the excitement of doing mathe-
matics.

The Beauty of Doing Mathematics, by Serge Lang (Springer-
Verlag)

Math!, by Serge Lang (Springer-Verlag)

Both of these books are transcripts of oral presentations,
described as “dialogs.” The first transcribes a series of lectures
to the general public given in France, and the second contains
dialogs with high-school students (rather bright high school
students). The printed texts lose some of the intensity of the
oral presentation, but both books manage to convey a little of
what mathematics is really like.

identity and a society’s quest for immortality. Each person has a
“jewel” in his or her brain that learns its host’s personality over a period
of twenty to thirty years. After that time, the jewel is removed to a
different body in which it acts as the brain; since the jewel can never die,
the person becomes effectively immortal. Here the protagonist is very
exercised over the question of\^iiether die person with the jewel in his
or her head is the actual person or just a fiicsimile — is Mom real or is
she memorex? Predictably, the character develops a sort ofschizophre-
nia . Mr. Egan writes a compelling and strange story that surpasses even
his weird and wonderful scenario . Tlie problem wi A this one is that this
reader, at least, starts to become aware of the artificiality of the
situation. We never satisfactorily learn why he is sensitive to 'wdiat
everyone aroimd him considers as ordinary and beneficial as electric
lights. The narrator’s problem, learning to be himself, is one with
which we can all feel empathy, but his particular circumstances distance
us from his ejperiences and make us lose some feeling for him. If his
problem were “Am I myself or i^iiat my parents made me? ” we’d be
able to understand, having shared that experience. His problem, “Am
I myself, or such an exact copy that even I can’t tell the diflference?” is
more reminiscent of a Steven Wright joke than of an identity crisis . The
images here are powerful, but they are damaged by being part of a
science fiction milieu where one ejq>ects a certain kind of engineering-
grade logic because at the story’s center is a society-changing piece of
hardware.

Anodier imagistic story of Mr. Egan’s that is somewhat less
ambiguously successful is “The Caress.” Lots of fantastic stuff goes on
here too, but it is set in what seems to be a problem-solving story, so
the images do not go off on their own and confuse us; the plot
disciplines them. It appears to be a standard detective story; a nasty
smell comes from a house, a cop is called and a body discovered. So is
a creature with the body of a leopard and the head of a woman: a live
sphinx. The rest of the story concerns the attempt to find out why a
sphinx was made and discovers an artist/^ioenginecr gone mad, whose
goal is to re-create in reality the images of transcendent art. Interest-
ingly, this was a popular pasttime at the turn of the century, in a parlor
game called tableaux vivants, people would dress up in elaborate
costumes and strike the poses of master paintings. So, too, in the story,
but to an extreme. In the hcstfin-de-siicletTzdidon, the artist does not

14 The New York Review of Science Fiction

even photograph his recreation, but simply assembles it, looks at it, and
walks away from a job well done. Here is a nice sf version of cop-story
meets decadent-artist-story. We can almost hear Huysmans, Magritte or
Wilde laughing in the backgroimd. This hybrid is energized by its mixed
pedigree, though the family lines arc very clear.

Lucius Shepard, collaborating with Robert Frazier, presents us with
another hybrid, “The All-Consuming.” Mr. Shepard usually piggybacks
a horror story on the scenario of a political thriller, but here he adds the
extra twist of another decadent experience-artist in a story like Ka&a’s
“The Hunger Artist” turned on its head. The character after whom the
story is named is a Japanese man who likes to cat things — ^not food;
things. The main character in the story goes out into a jungle poisoned
by runaway genetic experiments and brings back the most dangerous -
looking — and actually dangerous — plants, animals, minerals and detri-
tus he can find which the All-Consuming eats . Not much to our surprise,
the All-Consuming finally gets too much of a bad thing and bursts into
a horrifying, fungus ridden thing himself, consumed by what he has
consumed. The pleasure in Mr. Shepard’s works is the sense of reality
with which he writes of Latin America and also of his vivifying mixture
of three genre conventions. However, though the element of the
decadent esthete from literary history is fUn, since we do not get to know
him as a person, let alone are convinced ofhis motivations, we do not feel
much for him when he is consumed. One again thinks of Huysmans
wiiosc main character in Against Nature also searches for new experi-
ences that will give his life meaning, or at least relieve his eimui. When
in the end he collapses “in bitterness and disgust” (two taste-words,
especially pertinent to Shepard and Frazier’s story) we know that he has
tried and fiiilcd. The AU-Consuming has simply arrived and dined.
Shepard and Frazier’s effect is carried throu^ the image— powerful
though that is — but goes no deeper into oiu minds.

There are other stories based largely on image, but these add
powerful character elements and do not live and die by image alone. The
twomost intriguing ofthese are Pat Miuphy’s “Love and Sex Among the
Invertebrates” and Terry Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire.” Ms. Murphy
comes closest to making hay out of our current crop of writers’ interest
in blending sf with post-modernism mostly because she sticks closely to
the conservative conventions of sf which emphasize plot and character.
“Love and Sex” starts with that conventional sf setting, a city right after

a nuclear war. The point of view character, again that conventional sf
personage, the naive, cloistered scientist, creates a new life from spare
parts, welding together soda cans and pipe fittings to make two
creatures w^iich— whether in reality or only in die main character’s
neutron-blasted mind— mate. This is science fentasy— or pure, post-
modern fentasy in which unlikely things happen for esthetic, not
scientific, reasons as in the works of Borges and Garcia Marquez. But
this is not merely an ars£rfHia »rtis story; it is the last thou^ts, the
elegy, of the point of vie w character and it is moving not because of what
we understand about the creatures she creates but because her charac-
ter, die choices she has made and the &te she frees— in short, her life —
become real. The strength of this story is its images, yes, and its poetry
too, but above all, it is driven by our increasing knowledge of the
character, her hopes, sadnesses and motivations. In the story’s last
paragraph all three elements come together, the poetry, the re^ty of
the character and the image that is central to the story: “My time is over .
The dinosaurs and the humans — our time is over. New times are
coming. New types of love. I dream of the future, and my dreams are
filled with the ratde of metal claws.” Sf by convention and concern,
post-modem in style, but “best” because of its human concerns, and
because all its elements come together to make a satisfying whole.

A story that does the same kind of thing in a very different way is
Terry Bisson’s deli^tful “Bears Discover Fire.” The title, by the way,
is all the story is about. Bears sit around the fire on the medians of
highways and quit hibernating in the winter. The main character and his
nephew get interested and go out to sit with them sometimes and the
circle of the bears’ fire is where the main character’s mother goes to die.
The story is told in a very traditional manner; it could have appeared in
Bo/s Life, with its folksy narrator and descriptions of how to mount a
tire manually, but its effect is as strange as any of the esthetic stories
above.

Lewis Shiner’s contribution is a very Donald Barthelme-likc,
fractured friry-tale kind of story about not-quite real things that
happened to real people who may or may not have been like the
characters that appear here. In “White City,” J. P. Morgan’s daughter
encounters Nicola Tesla at the Chicago World’s Fair. He is aloof; she
is attracted. We feel the usual tension of a disastrous, hopeless affair.
Tesla cares only about his demonstration at midnight of a particul^ly
powerful method of electric lighting he has invented. Other historical
personages are present: Mr. Morgan, Tesla’s patron George Westing-
house and his friend Samuel Clemens who insists that everyone call him
by his pen name. Tesla’s arch rival, Edison, is mentioned: he has lost the
race to build the electric light. Mr. Shiner’s style is spare and his
concerns are literary; he writes like a typical post modernist, compress-
ing a novel into a very short story, presenting as if by shorthand the
standard conventions of doomed attraction and professional rivalry.
The climax is sf, though. Tesla’s device li^ts up the night— literally: it
ignites the sky (no oqjlanation ofhowthis happens is givenbut we don’t
feel its lack in this character-driven story) and darkness is forever
banished. But the ending again is literary: Tesla hurries away from the
fair, understanding that people will hate him for wiut he has done, but
not understanding why. The story is attractive because of its imagM : the
frmous people gathering and the sky on fire, but it is itself illuminated
by its concern with character.

This is also the case with Connie Willis’ “Cibola” which also is rich
in character and description, friough its tale of an old woman who
supposedly knows the location of Coronado’s Seven Qties of Gold
turns out to be a shaggy dog story: the gold is the city of Denver as seen
from the Cherry Creek reservoir with the early morning sun shining off
its office towers. Connie Willis plays this sli^ tale for more than it is
worth, utilizing her considerable wit to keep it interesting. The charac-
ters are vividly drawn and an irresistible tension builds as the reporter
chases a wild goose ^^hile gaining confidence that something special is
going to happen. Because the telling is more interesting than the talc,
though, the writer is the star of this story— a very p^-modem effect,
though I don’t know if that is quite what Ms. Willis had in mind.

Some of the stories do not benefit from their contact with the
literary world. They arc well told, with good descriptions of charact«
and interesting premises. They are also different fix>m the nm ofthe mill
sf stories, neither merely posing a cheap problem to solve, nor hatiling
out ffiat traditional sense of wonder. In their ambition they arc to be

admired. I find them less than completely satisfying because, to me, they
only do ^at mainstream literature does, but do it less well. They do not
c}qploit their sf concepts enough to give the reader a powerful and mind-
bending plot nor do they deliver a strong enough esthetic punch, using
their sf scenarios to produce in the reader a strange and wonderful effect,
as do pretty much all of the stories mentioned so fiir. These writers are
all in the midst of successful careers; clearly their work is completely
satisfying to many readers.

I tlfink of the stories of these writers as mood pieces, standard Eire
in the literary magazines of a previous era. The best of those writers,
Flannery O’Connor or Sherwood Anderson, gave us slices of life that
were moving and informative. But the run ofthe mill stuff was just that.
The best ofthe “mood-piece” stories here is Ian McDonald’s beauti-
fully written “Rainmaker Cometh.” Mr. Dozois’ introduction likens it
to Bradbury (a mood-piece writer if ever there was one, but the best in
the business) and it is that and it is more than that. A town needs rain —
Bradburyesque — but \shat comes is not just rain but a floating city.
That’s a surprise. But not much else happens. The characters are w^
drawn, but ffiey don’t change or learn much. The revelation at the end
of the story is not worthy of the fimfrre that led up to it. Yet, Mr.
McDonald is clearly a writer to watch. His command of style and image
is formidable and i^e promised more than he delivered in this story, his
promise is so great, he must surely deliver sometime.

I don’t feel so s anguin e about the other “mood pieces,” Nancy
Kress’ “Inertia,” Molly Gloss’ “Personal Silence” and “Past Magic” by
Ian MacLeod. All three depict a run-down future world and all three
make a point about human nature, but as is conventional with “mood
pieces,” their points are somewhat ambiguous. In “Inertia,” a disease
plagues a large section of society and the sick are shut away in things that
resemble housing projects. A doctor comes among them, unprotected,
to investigate the disease — he’s a renegade and soon the police come
and restore the quarantine. But one ofthe diseased women gets out and
promises to infect the rest of society. The trick is that the disease does
two things: it disfigures its victims’ skin and makes them calmer, less
eager to act . In Ms . Kress’ view, this is just vdiat the world needs . Inside
the quarantine, the people slovdy learn to make do; outside the world
is going to hell in a handtruck. “Calm down” docs not seem to be a
strong enough message for a story, especially in this feel-good, trickle-
down Reagan/Bush era. There are some logical problems, too. The
quarantine seems odd: electricity is not allowed into the complex,
though I am sure that power lines do not carry contagions. At the same
time, thou^, charity goods arc allowed in. iWso there doesn’t seem to
be anything deleterious about the disease. It gives people bad skin —
sometimes, more or less — but it doesn’t put as much of a crimp in their
lives as the lack of electricity does. There arc old people in the
compounds, and young people who have been bom there, and middle-
aged ones worried about getting old. People eke out a living, pursue
love affairs, fight. In short, they don’t act very sick. The story is rich
in detail and character; its ideas are engrossing, and while it is as well-
written as any “literary” mood piece from the New Torker or the
Saturday Evening Post of another era, its efect is less than the sum of
its parts.

The same must be said for “Personal Silence” and “Past Mage.”
Again the characters are well-drawn, the topics arc earnest, but so little
happens, so little message is delivered that the story can be described as
well done, but not particularly effective.

Several stories in the collection emphasize plot, but it is important
to note that these are not tiie old-fashioned action-adventure, ripping
yams that sf has so often cranked out. Plot is important to fficse writers
the way it was important to Joseph Conrad, as a stmeturing device and
as method of drawing the reader into the mood and mind ofthe story.
In many ways, these arc intellectual stories which pose problems —
moral choices — not merely to be solved by the stories’ actions, but to
become meditations which often could be extracted from the story and
serve as the basis for a very energetic argument.

Kate 'Wilhelm’s “And the Angels Sing” is primarily plot-driven.
An injured, angelic alien (one can’t help but think of Garcia Mhrquez’s
“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings") is discovered and two of
the locals see it as their ticket to the big time . But should they imprison
it, or when it becomes healthy, let it fly away? (Do I hear the dilemma
central to Camus’ “The Guest”?) This story can be considered “best”

The New Yori< Review of Science Fiction 15

for the virtues Ms. Wilhelm imbues in all her work: strong characters,
vivid descriptions and a powerful ending. Because of these character-
istics, it is one of the most traditional sf stories in the book and is
atypical of the rest of the collection, being pretty much free of obvious
literary cross-breeding (thou^ one can detect its literary influences)
except, like the works of Ms. Kiress, Ms. Gloss and Mr. MacLeod, in
its sheer execution.

Similar, because it also centers around a moral choice, is Michael
Moorcock’s “The Cairene Purse,” a missing-person mystery story set
in the not -too-distant- future Aswan. The story has a museum quality
to it; it seems a relic from Edwardian literature, like Agatha Christie
meets E. M. Forester and like those writers, it delivers quality goods in
the form of character and in the description of its setting. If it were only
that, of course, it would belong in a museum, not in a “best of”
collection. It is enlivened by its imagery, more subtle than the images
of the stories mentioned so &r, of the particular place at a particular
time, not yet arrived at in history. We see the trendy, artist-attracting
town of Aswan, a little seedy, a litde overpriced like St. Tropez or
Greenwich Village in our generation. We sec the disastrous effects of
the Aswan dam piling up around the Egyptian’s feet and finally we see
the Cairene purse: something, we are told, of great value (\shat? is the
central mystery of the story) being passed by an English woman who
came to Aswan as an archeologist and stayed as practical muse to try
to help with its present problems . The story gains from its mixture of
futuristic concerns and Mr Moorcock’s borrowed from the past,
hypnotically eloquent style.

But these two, for all their delights, lack the intellectual ferocity
of the other plot-driven stories in the collection. Robert Silverberg’s
“Hot Sky” is a sea-story involving a mutiny, an SOS and an iceberg
trawler captain who has to make a moral choice. There is a certain
femiliarity in this story: one feels that the choices the captain feces have
been faced by other captains in literature. The mind reaches out: was
it Melville or Conrad who posed the same question? One cannot
ignore the echoes. What makes this story compelling is the feverish
mood generated by the greenhouse-heated, UV lit “hot sky” of the
title. Interestingly, the ending is ambiguous and decisions about the
correctness of the captain’s choice is left to the reader. The story does
not so much end as transfer the problem from the captain who needs
to act more than think to the reader who can only think about tiie
actions of the story.

Another story that sets a moral problem for the reader to solve is
John Brunner’s “The First Since Ancient Persia,” in which a race of
immortals is created through biotechnology, and like the “Immortals”
of King Xerxes, they go forth to conquer the “civilized” world. The
story has ramifications that go fer beyond winding up its plot elements.
The “Immortals” are a peasant army created among the campesinos of
Latin America and they have a score to settle with the gringos. This is
class warfare pure and simple; what is not simple is that vsiiile the
conclusion of the battle is foregone, but the implications of victory are
not. Especially in light of the failed victory of the last class war, the
Commxinist revolutions and their flagging hegemonies, Mr. Brunner
poses a problem that extends beyond the bounds of his story.

Charles SheflBeld poses a moral problem of a different sort: in “A
Braver Thing” one man takes credit for the work of a friend, and
interestin^y, Mr. Sheffield suggests this imposture is the “braver
thing” of the title — ^the fiiend has secrets ^hich must be suppressed
though his discoveries cannot. What a moral minefield for each reader
to puzzle out for himself! like Mr. Moorcock’s, this seems a museum
piece with somewhat hazy antecedents. There is a real Edwardian
feeling to this story. Its concerns are only marginally scientific; the
discovery for which the narrator takes credit could have been of
anything — a rare document or lost jewel as well as a scientific theory.
The emphasis here is on plot and character — both of wiiich are
powerfully resolved — and on the moral implications of the narrator’s
claim. In tiiis, the story relies heavily on ihe mainstream literary
tradition, the literature of morality taught in classics courses in col-
lege and it benefits from such close contact to writers of “the classics.”
Indeed it seems like it would be more at home in a thirties periodical
than a nineties anthology: we tend to sec things a bit more cynically
than do Mr. Sheffield’s cliaracters. This is the era when one of the
major concerns of the scientific community is detecting feked discov-

1 6 The New York Review of Science Fiction

cries and fiflsified data.

In Bruce Sterling’s “We See Things Differently” the plot itself, not
its implications, is v^at challenges the reader, both emotionally and
intellectually. In it, a reporter from the dominant Arabic culture comes
to America to interview a pop singer who is promoting patriotism and
individuality and generally inspiring an uprising or resurgence of Amer-
ican culture. The narrator is a charming character, slightly dubious ofhis
culture’s scruples, genuinely interested in American culture, extremely
polite in the way “good-guy” assimilatcd-culturc-types are portrayed in
Western literature (for example. Dr. AzzizinAP/wra^^toIn/^w). During
the interview, he breaks out a little cocaine in the guise of a fen getting
high with his idol and the reader thinks “uh-oh.” Not only is the
American pop-culture hero prey to nasty habits, but it turns out the
ingratiating Arab reporter spiked the cocaine with a carcinogen on the
orders of the imam, and both he and the American will die of cancer. The
Arab explains that he believes in the jihad, the holy war to spread Islam,
and that giving his life for the cause is his ticket to paradise. When he says
“we sec things differently” it is not as an American would say it, that we
have a respectful difference of opinion, but rather that his method of
battle is so different from the Americans’ as to be beyond imagining, or
at least suspicion.

Mr. Sterling gets his power first from that tried and true sf
convention of turning the world on its head and depicting the reader’s
culture (American) as defeated and downtrodden. TWs makes the reader
angry, so the story starts on a high level of emotion. Mr. Sterling
exacerbates this by not only destroying but betraying the one hope ofthe
reader’s culture. What is espedaUy interesting is the apparent accuracy
with which Mr. Sterling portrays the Arab mind. The unshakable belief
in Islam and the depth ofself-sacrificcreallyare ideas and ideals for which
we are little prepared. And he hits anerve when he depicts the American’s
weakness for cocaine. Mr. Sterling might have ended by saying “East is

East and West is West ” He is portraying anew a truth tlut was once

considered universal.

Another story that investigates through plot the power of an idea is
Joe Haldeman’s “The Hemingway Hoax.” Its indebtedness to main-
stream literature is clear in its tide and pretty much ends there; the titles
to the various sections taken fix>m Hemingway’s stories do not go much
beyond face value, so if you don’t remember all the details from “The
Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” or get it mixed up with “Cat in the Rain”
you won’t need to take a refresher course to enjoy the “Hoax.” The
challenge Mr. Haldeman presents is not in allusion but in idea. The
conflict is not, as it would appear, between the hoaxer and the public nor
the criminal and his cronies but between the professor who mi^ht
perform the hoax and a time warden who 'wants to prevent it: the hoax,
it appears, woiJd renew an interest in machismo and screw up future
politics in various time-lines. An interesting premise and a fascinating
way of playing with the dictum that “life imitates Art.” The situation
becomes even more complicated ^^hen the time -warden realizes that he
cannot simply snuff out the hoaxer as he normally would. Instead the
hoaxer and the story shift from time line to time line where many details
of the hoaxer’s life are different but the hoax remains central, a good sf
twist, but question of the hoax’s influence remains central, especially
because every time the warden “lolls” the hoaxer, he reappears in a form
more like Hemingway himself and therefore possibly better able to
complete the hoax. The question is implied — and it worries the warden
who has never lost control of a situation before — if life imitates art, what
docs art imitate? This is no mere time-travel conundrum because the
consequences ofthe hoax have been made clear. The question is not one
of which came first, the chiclten or the egg, but does man have control
ofhis own destiny. Even with a deus cxmachiiu to help him, man is not
able to control events, even those that are human events, inspired by the
works of man. This is a fest -paced adventure story, but its implications
s{^ out wider than the plot and really set the reader’s intellect to work.

It is worth noting that this is the last story in the book, one self-
consciously aware of its literary heritage.

Another brain-twisting story is Ursula Le Guin’s “The Shobies’
Story.” In it philosophy merges with physics — but, wait: this sort of talk
is commonnowadays. We read about physics and dancing Wu Li masters,
indeed it is traditional to see the universe in a grain of sand. But for the
most part, when an sf writer starts merging the two, what results is fuzzy
thinking that satisfies neither students of physics nor philosophy and

Read This

Recendy read and recommended by Jonathan Lethem:

Autoerotic Fatalities by Hazelwood, Dietz and Burgess. An
F.B.I. agent, a lawyer, and an M.D. collaborated on this
monograph, which centers on the challenges of distinguish-
ing this form of death-by-misadventurc from murder or
suicide. Juries in insurance investigation trials are notoriously
reluctant to pay out in such cases, and the authors, who are
humorless but unreproachful, would like to right this par-
ticular wrong. The legalese is interspersed with 58 numbered
paragraphs each describing in detail the death scene of an
autoerotic fatality. The mechanisms devised by the victims
arc literally febulous, replete wirii waterbo^e counter-
weights, slipknot frilsafes (tshich, obviously, feiled), electri-
fied brassieres, motorized rotisserics, balloons, barbells, gas
masks, dolls, guns, traffic cones and red ribbons and bows. I
thou^t of Ballard, of course, but also of Bester’s “Disap-
pearing Act.” like the inhabitants of Ward T, the subjects
have slipped away into worlds of their own devising, while
the scenes they leave behind are puzzled over by soldiers and
medics. What these hapless souls require is poets, but in the
world of Autoerotic Fatalities, as in Bester’s futixrc America,
no poets arc available.

It Happened- In Boston? by Russell H. Grcenan. Grccnan is
one of those great oddball writers vho used to be able to
putter along in midlist, the kind that nowadays is probably
better advised to work in-genre, like Tom De Haven or Jack
Womack. How to sum him up^ The rare-book dealer who
put me onto him did it like this: “I have this fiinny cus-
tomer — only collects two authors : Philip K. Dick and Russell
Greenan.” It Happened In Boston? is the story of an idiot

savant who can paint like Da Vinci, and after I read it I went
back and shelled out for the autographed copy.

The M.D. by Thomas M. Disch. This book crosses from horror
to sf two-thirds of the way through, because it has to, because
Disch’s genre intelligence demands that the horror tropes be
placed in a broader social context, because Disch is showing
that magic is a technology. Sure, the narrative drive felters a
little. But only for the most interesting reasons, damn it.

Public Eye: An Investigation Into the Disappearance of the
World by Brian Fawcett. Fawcett is an eloquent crank, mostly
disgusted with McLaihan’s Global Village, and just a bit of a
Luddite. He groimds his complaints in lucid little parables,
unnerving short stories, and plenty of specific proposals:
“Lawyers will be given the option of dressing in clown or
vampire costumes during court trials ...”

Rationalizif^ Genius: Ideolo^cal Strate^es in the Classic
American Science Fiction Story by John Huntington. Hunt-
ington simply identifies deeply embedded contradictions at
the heart of a bunch of canonical stories: “Microcosmic
God,” “NighthJl,” “Arena”, “Surfece Tension,” “The Roads
Must Roll,” “Scanners Live in Vain,” et al. This is a book that
sends you rushing back to the fiction. It inspired my reading
and my writing.

Memories of Amnesia by Lawrence Shainberg. If Michael
Blumlein could collaborate withFlann O’Brien, this might be
the result. A great science fiction novel.

usually serves as a crutch to get some plot device past the readers by
confusing them. Not so wiA Ms. Le Guin. Early in “The Shobies’
Story” a long discussion is engaged in which the characters discuss ihe
workings of the drive of the spaceship they are about to test, but rather
than being a mere “As you toow, C^orge...” expository lump, a real
and difficult investigation ofreality ensues, one that is vitally interesting
in itself, despite its intellectual difficulty. I do not knowifthe principles
of physics Ms. Le Guin conjures are accurate (they are new to me, in
any case), but if this is a fudge of scientific explanation, it is as good as
the real e3q>lanation itself. What is more, Ms. Le Guin actually
convinces us that reality is subjective, at least in part, more or less as
Heisenberg argues. This fact is then played out as the testers take the
ship through a frster than li^t leap and arrive — ^where? Only their
retellings of ihe events of their journey, seen from each person’s point
of view, enable them to understand what happened and how to get the
ship back home. Of course, this sort of physics verges on magic, but it
is the most thoroughly cjqplained and intellectually rigorous magic ever
written about in sf.

In many ways , this is the most satisfying science fiction story in the
book because it does several things that the genre is supposed to do
(i.e., which readers expect): it rigorously investigates an area ofsdence;
it creates a plausible future society complete with its own customs and
ethics; and it spins out a gripping plot based on two events that are
guaranteed attention-holders: an experiment and a rescue. At the same
time it does what non-geruc literature c3q>ccts, but which sf often
shortcuts: it draws interesting characters and describes the world
vividly. But this is old news concerning Ms. Le Guin’s writing; if ^e
isn’t personally responsible for dragging these things into the genre by
the neck, she is famous for doing them as no one else is . It is not a perfect
story: the ending is a little cutesy and sentimental. Also, it is hard to
imagine a society so advanced it sends children into danger as test
pilots. (It is a mere caprice of the narrative that tiie solution to the

Shobies’ problem is posed by a child . Another character with an innocent
nature could have done the job as well.) Nevertheless, this is good old
science fiction and then some : an adventure in outer space, hard science ,
soft science and characters. It is interesting to note that this is one of the
least “literary,” more genre-conventional stories in the book and
ironically, it comes from the only one of the book’s writers who is
accepted outside the field. This in itself is a strong message to those
writers who are producing sf, but wishing they were writing for the New
Torker. The genre is not exhausted; on the contrary, this book and “The
Shobies’ Story” in particular, indicate that there is plenty of room for
innovation even within sfs most standard conventions . Those who take
inspiration from mainstream literature may find hybrid vigor, but those
who are attempting to write crossover works may find that rather than
writing hybrids, they are simply diluting their work and the readers will
find it neither flesh nor fowd.

If “The Shobies’ Story” is the high point of the book in terms of
conventional sf, there are some stories that are so challenging cither in
concept or evocation they must be ^ven special attention.

One ofthc most interesting things that can be “best” about sf is its
ability to challenge the reader. Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon”
fascinates with a sheer act of imagination. Technically, it is hardly
“literary” at all despite the fact that it is based on a Bible story; it has very
little in the way of characters or plot. But then, it simply doesn’t need
them. It is almost entirely a description ofthc Tower ofBabyion as if it
had in fact been built in a world vdicre bricks could reach up past the path
of the sim to the crystal dome of heaven itself. It is a story of pure
imagination, starting with its image of ihe tower seen from a distance
beanpoling into the sky down to the details of what sort of brick and
mortar must be used in the tower’s higher reaches where the heat of the
sun is an important engineering consideration. One of the things that
attracts a reader to the genre of sf is the desire to encounter things that
only the imagination can provide: aliens, galactic empires, the Tower of

The New York Review of Science Fiction 17

Babylon. The ending is a bit disappointing in that there isn’t any
evocation of the mythopoetic “sense of wonder” the original story
provided with its e)q>lanation of the origins of languages, but the
interest of this story is not in its events but its stunning location.

The story that most struck me was John Kessel’s “Invaders.” It
seems innocent enough to start with and even as it hints at its dark
message, it continues to lull the readers widilittle jokes. Mr. Kessel links
the faU of the Inca empire with the fall of western civilization brougjit
about bypeople from outer space, the Krell (one ofthe small jokes) who
have an empire extending across sixteen solar systems given to them by
God (like Cortez’ empire) but vjho only want to become cocaine
addicts. This addiction Mr. Kessel likens to the reading of science
fiction because both center around the desire to escape. Jiunping
from one era and set of characters (including the author in the act of
writing the story) the narrative’s images are disturbing and its connec-
tions intellectui, but the story is remarkably powerful as it challenges
the reader, first to detect the idea that connects the segments and
characters and second to confront the moral the author draws from his
tale. This may be the story that has learned the most from its literary
influences. like a post-modem story, it depends on its reader’s
knowledge of history, sf and even Marxist literary criticism. Unlike
most post -modem stories, it takes its elements seriously. Mr. Kessel
tells a moving story ofeourage — shown equally by the greatly oumum-
bered conquistadors and their hostage, the Inca king Atahualpa — and
discourses seriously about the need for escape in a world he convinc-
ingly paints as crud. This is a story with a message, but it is hip enough
not only to know that messages don’t go over with modemreadere, but
that a Uttle trickery in the narrative will reignite that old-fashioned
interest in what the story means. Mr. Kessd realty has the reader on his
or her toes and the exercise pays off.

Dafydd ab Hugh’s “The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His
Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk" does things that can only be
done in a science fiction story. It is a story told by a skunk about an
adventure he took with a boy and a dog to conquer their enemies. If
done as a fentasy story, it woiild sink to mere symbolism and be passed
over lightly, its meanings taken, but not absorbed became that is how
adults usually respond to fairytales — they sec them as diversions,albeit
seriom ones. The same sort of thing would happen if this were done as
a post-modern story: the significance of the events would seem less
important than the conventions with which the author plays. (Indeed
one of the flaws of the story is its nods to convention: the Beatrice
Potteresque “Mr. Skunk” of the title and the self-consdous reference
to Ballard in its “squeezed novel.” ) But becatisc it is science fiction, the
story expects its events to be taken seriously, not interpreted into
harmlessness. We understand that “Democrazy” is not so much an idea
as a disease caused by some unknown effect of nuclear fallout: now all

the animals can talk and so they must treat each other with respect.
Became “Democrazy” is a real thing, a medical condition, not a
metaphor, two scenes are possible that could not be otherwise. One is
the scene in which the boy Nik Nok and the dog Disha make love. It is
remarkably moving and tender — ^the boy is so yoimg and awkward he
doesn’t know what to do; the dog is so practical she demands the boy
satisfy her before withdrawing — ^whilc being disturbing. Without
Democrazy, the disease that forces members of diflferent species to be
equal, such a scene could at best be tasteless. Here, it is poetic. The same
is true for the scene in which a cat argues eloquently for its life while its
killers debate the merits of its arguments in tones reminiscent of a
Platonic dialog. But then the killers aU eat the “cat food”; biology
requires it. In 5iis milieu of philosophy and love, the conventional fin^
action scene is a bit uncomfortable, but I suppose it is necessary to
complete the quest and smashthe bunker ofthe last humans not infected
with Democrazy. They are the bad guys, after all, still practicing cruelty
to animals, i.e.,the coon ofthe title, as they practiced it on each other
in the nuclear war. Yet, the real ending is not the action clim ax, but the
observation that the disease is spreading to birds and that ^shile they are
getting a little smarter, all the other animals are getting a Uttle stupider.
Sic impUcation being that peace will again come to the world when all
its creatures are dumb animals. Again, the Uteralness of this ending is
what makes it so moving. The author docs not imply that we should be
like the dumb animals, as Walt Whitman wishes, though even he is only
making a comparison; he doesn’t mean it Uterally. Mr. ab Hugh says
that we must Uterally become animals to achieve peace . Peace, he dem-
onstrates must not 1^ argued for because arguments take second place
to biological needs — the cat died arguing — ^but rather imposed by in-
controvertible biology itself.

literary influences have clearly become more important to the field
than ever before both in terms of the breadth of influences the writers
draw on and in the writers’ sophistication in using conventions from
various sub-genres and styles. Generally, though, when the authors mix
genres they can achieve the kind of hybrid vigor that revivifies sf. When
they borrow methods and/or materials intact from mainstream Utera-
turc, the stories tend to feel well done, but a Uttle heartless, maybe even
a bit thin-blooded, like the Russian royal family.

In his introduction and appendix, Mr. Dozois goes to great lengths
to educate his readers about the current state of science fiction and he
docs an exhaustive and exceUent job; he gets you up to speed in a hurry
if you haven’t been able to keep up yourself. His choice of stories,
though, tells more than any description not only the current trends if sf,
but >^at possibiUtics the field itself holds.

Leonard Rysdyk teaches English at Nassau Community College.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.

Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1990; $25.95 he; 520 pages

reviewed by Robert Legautt

I don’t want to dwell on the circumstances of AUce Sheldon’s
tragic 1987 suicide, but I do feel that it needs mentioning here. It was
all the more shoeing, perhaps, because unlike, say, poets, science
fiction writers haven’t tended to be suicidal. H. Beam Piper is the
only other SF writer I know wiio took his own Ufe.

One needn’t know anything about the personal life of AUce
Sheldon (ai:.a. James Tiptree, Jr., a Jt.a. Raccoona Sheldon) to pick up
on the fascination with death that infuses her fiction, though; but like
that of Ernest Hemingway, wlio also spent a lot ot time thinking about
death, Sheldon’s suicide seems to say, “You see? I wasn’t kidding.” She
did kid about it, but deatii is every^erc in Tiptree’s work.

And not just individual death. In no less than a third of the
eighteen stories in this posthumous best-of collection, we have the
death not merely of various characters, but of the entire human race,
with the extinction of a large part of us featuring as a background in
several others. In her essay “A Woman Writing Science Fiction and
Fantasy” (in Women of Vision, ed. Denise Du Pont [St. Martin’s,
1988]), Tiptree says that her childhood travels left her at an early age

18 The New York Review of Science Fiction

with “a case of horror vitae that lasted all my Ufe . ” This was directed at
a broad range of human characteristics, but centers on the helplessness
of hmnans before our own irrational drives, be they sexual, aggressive,
or the curiosity that killed the cat.

Tiptree’s is the deadly counter to the can-do tradition in sf: aU
those tales of disaster — The Black Cloud and so forth — ^where man the
engineer, his trusty slide rule by his side, meets a threat and prevails
due to all those sterling quaUties we know humans possess: logic,
courage, resourcefulness, and the abiUty to play a wild himch. In
Tiptree’s universe, we never had a chance. Within us arc the seeds
of something utterly foreign, waiting only for its trigger to spring
forth and leave a tattered, dying husk where once was one of Barth’s
finest (“A Momentary Taste of Being”). Or turn even a conscientious
scientist struggling to imdcrstand a deadly phenomenom — i.e. Homo
Campbellensis, the typical sf hero — into another of its hapless victims
(“The Sorewfly Solution”).

Grouping the stories imdcr various headings as has been done here
doesn’t really serve much purpose. Certainly there are recurring themes

in her stories, but the positioning here seems a bit arbitrary; one could
easily reshuffle different stories into the different groupings and they
would still fit. , , 1 ■ ■ 1

In “The Last Flight ofDr. Ain,” a mild-mannered biologist quietly
exterminates the human race by sowing the seeds of a deadly vims on
a round-the world ffight. This is made sympathetic by contrasting it
with the possible death of M Ufe on earth by Man the PoUuter.

In “The Screwfly Solution,” it’s aliens who are doing the ex-
terminating, though we don’t learn that until the end. This is really
one of the great horror stories of all time, and like many great works
of horror it turns the horror outward, to the world we live in. ^ in-
visible substance causes the male sexual urge to mutate into a violent
one. This is all the more scary because we know there are people
where this has more or less already taken place (Ted Bundy must have
been one).

In both these stories (grinningly grouped as The Green Hills ot
Earth”— I think “The Year of the Jacket” would be better if you want
to go for the ironic Heinlein reference) there’s a Gary Larson-like sense
that turnabout is fair play for the animal kingdom (sidebar of a cow in
front of a cooler fiiU of human corpses hanging from meathooks): Ain
says to himself that the otters will come back to San Francisco Bay after
humanity is gone. “The Screwfly Solution” takes its title from a method
of insect control that the first narrator is putting into practice . (Another
Tiptree story not in this collection, “Beaver Tears,” features a similar
old-switchcroo concept.)

In “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill s Side,
our sex drive doesn’t kill us off, but it renders us the helplessly homy
second-class citizens ofthe galaxy. This story is more broadly humorous
than many of Tiptrec’s, though it’s every bit as horrific vhen you start
to think about it. . . i. •

Tiptree regarded herself as mainly an “idea writer,” and she is, a
good deal ofthe time. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” is a more fully
realized character study, an ugly-duckling ^e gone v*wj. Here we
encounter another recurring element in Tiptree’s fiction: the rigid
future society that is even more fiawed than oiu present-day one. If
you’re a pesssimist about the future of humamty, then you have to
believe that if civilization docs survive, it will warp in ever-more-sinister
ways. The media combine that turns hapless P. Burke into Delphi,
glitter superstar , is a step or two away fi:om the one that sanitizes today’s
world situation.

“The Man Who Walked Home” is a lesser work, more of an
exercise in mood and wonder, and in expressionistic bursts of writing,
than a fully realized talc . Even here we find femiliar themes : the advance
of ignorance after civilations’s breakdown, the some^^hat ugly mob,
which unknowingly injures the man accidentally unhinged in time.

“And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways,” also a le^
effort, is most notable for its acerbic portrait of an all-encomp^sing,
rigid future religion that goes by the name of “Science.” It’s like the
fimdamentalists’ nightmare of Ocular Humanism come true, as the
hero fights to keep back Unscientific thoughts, which are, of course, a
first glimmering of genuine scientific curiousity. Naturally, in the
Tiptree universe, the prognosis is not good.

These last four stories arc collected under the subhead “The
Boundaries of Humanity,” which doesn’t really tell us much of any-
thing; it seems a catch-all title. Not so the three stories in the next
section, “Male and Female,” which grapple with the essence ofthat very
dialectic.

And here a word about Tiptree’s feminism. In the essaymcntioned
above, and elsewhere, Tiptree ejqpresscs a righteous and direct outrage
at the plight of women, at “men and their wars,” an outrage that is all
the more genuine because of her quite cosmopolitan point of view; she
is talking not merely of America or Western society, but ofthe world.
With this view I have no quarrel; the sense of horror I feel at much of

humanity’s situation is, I think, similar to hers.

When she addresses these questions in fiction, though, things get
more complex. For one thing, a strong element of humor and irony
enters the picture. Tiptree has stated that she withdrew “The Women
Men Don’t See” for consideration for awards because she thought it
wotild gain votes since a man — with the voice of a somevdiat Hem-
ingswayesque game fisherman (the secret of female identity behind hci
nom de plumehid not been revealed at the time) — had so sympatheti-

cally depicted the female characters’ alienation. What’s no less remark-
able than the erroneous reality she imagined people woidd see is how
sympathetic the male narrator is made by the female author. The gap
between male and female is a deep gulf, but sympathy is possible for each
side . (Note, though, that Don the narrator falls victim almost helplessly
at times to boy-toy agressive urges he’s not entirely aware of— a more
lighthearted treatment ofthe horrific urges in “Screwfly”).

In “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Paces Filled of light!” we arc
invited to choose firom two contrasting realities: in one the protagonist
lives in a beatific all-female civilization, in the other she lives in
present-day America and is a loony imagining herself Mr. Magoo-like
in that fixttire civilization. (“ ‘Don, she seemed so, I don’t know.
Happy and free. She — she was fun.' ‘That’s the sick part, honey.’ ”) In
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” three astronauts with The Ri^t
Stuff are catapulted into a future all-woman world, the exact nature of
which is only gradually, screamingly, hilariously revealed.

In both these tales, the xmderlying assumption is ffiat an all-
female world is a world without war. I’m not entirely convinced this
would be the case, though “Houston” stacks the deck fairly convinc-
ingly with the small population and the exact nature ofthe society built
on cloning. The most delightfully unsettling thing to me, a male reader,
is the sense of utter superfluity that the men must finally face instead of
getting to play Adam-and-Eve. In “Sisters” die most interesting thing
is the wzy die protagonist has no concept \sdiatever of “male.”

Here I will confess to occasional annoyance with Tiptrec’s vision
of female utopias as well; the deck is at times a bit too stacked. If “The
Women Men Don’t See” arc alienated from men, there’s no guarantee
that the aliens they take off with won’t turn out to have tendencies even
more obnoxious ^an MCP Earthmen. And “Houston” ends with the
strongsuggestion that the last men are going to be, um, done away with.
Big laugh, I admit; but what does that say about the women? Tiptree’s
strength, though, is that she goes for the balls but pulls the pimch just
enough to let you still stand up. It’s interesting that she allows her most
positive vision of Womyn United to be in the eyes of a putatively insane
woman who is savagely raped and destroyed.

If there’s a truly savage feminist tale in this book, it’s not these —
they’re too damn funny— but the slightly unwieldy “WithDclicate Mad
Hands," where the ugly duckling turns into a murderous quester after
dimly understood visions —

— Or, even more subversively, “We Who Stole the Dream” where
it’s all subtext: The story is buflt on a familiar insensitive human/
sensitive alien model, with parallels to Earth’s racism (I think of Avram
Davidson’s “Now Let Us Sleep” as the quintessential example ofthis).
But the mutilation the female aliens imdergo at the hands of the
insensitive humans grow progressively more ^sturbing the more par-
allels we can read with the myriad of terrestrial female mutilations —
clitoridectomy, footbinding, bikini waxing, whathaveyou — or, more
chillingly still, with the facts of normal human sex and reproduction.

For science fiction allows room for a truly radical feminist vision
that calls into question not merely the society of men and women but
the very fects of life. In “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” we slowiy
become aware of an alien character who is the victim of biological
imperatives he doesn’t even know about, much less tmderstand. Told
in idiosyncratic phrasing, it’s not quite as radical a restructuring of
language as Samuel Be^ett’s saga of blind, crawding mud-dwcilers,
How It Is — ^though qmte similar, and far stranger in concept. No male
praying mantis ever write an autobiography, but we have this story

instead. Tiptree has said that she intended it as a warning to humanity
about our own biological urges. The alienness of it is too strong for an
effective parable, I thfok; but that makes it better as, simply, a tdc of an
alien.

“A Momentary Taste of Being,” the longest story in the book,
builds a bit slowly, but climaxes spectacularly. Charles Fort thought we
were property; Tiptree has us ready to blow alway like the seeds on a
dandelion. like “Screwfly,” we end with amagnificent rambling speech
at the drunken wake for mankind. And once again, sex [of a sort] -
death.

Though not the main focus plotwise, the element of weird alien
sex-death ako rears its ugly head in “On the Last Afternoon.” A
struggling band of humans on a distant planet has haplessly built its
colony in what turns out to be the nesting site for giant alient lobsters!

The New York Review of Science Fiction 19

It’s up to a dying man, with the aid of a different, cerebral alien, to save
the place. But the tableau of the gigantic creatures’ mating rituals
overwhelms the suspense. After coming together with the female in “a
parody of human coupling,” the male bites her head off and leaves her
as a sac of eggs bmxowing mindlessly into the ground.

The concepts of reproduction in this and “Love Is the Plan” are
drawn more or less from the insect world (which can be even stranger),
but there *s always a feeling — telegraphed by the throwaway “parody”
line — that somehow the author is alluding to the implcasant facts of
human life as well. InTiptree’s world, Woody Allen’s remark about “sex
and death — ^the two things that come once in a lifetime” can be literally
true. And that time is the same time.

The final metamorphosis of this theme is “She Waits For All Men
Bom.” Now we see the evolution, not oflife,but ofDeafri itself, and its
final victory, once again. Though this is a more fanciful story, it’s still
another chillingvision ofthe ultimate, sterile dead end. That’s all, folks.

Or is it? “Slow Music” hedges the bet, with humanity mutating
into ethereal spirits. Jakko and Peachthief, among the last survivors, are
trying to make a new start for the human race. I confess I find this story
somewhat annoying, masterfully written though it is. We’ve watched
massive body pileups and grotesque Uebestodt galore. Now, jaded
spectators at the arena after so many lions, we turn thumbs down with
a bit of glee as the strange vortex sw^ows future hippie-girl Peachthief
as she strays too close, and Jakko as well vshen he tries to save her.

John Clute, in his introduction, calls “Slow Music” “Tiptree’s last
great story.” His assessment of JTJr’s art is generally astute, but this
remark I can’t agree with. Her two most chilling flirtations with death,
“Yanqui Doodle” and “Backward, Tiun Backward” (both collected in
A Crown of Stars, Tor, 1988), were still to come. The former, in
particular, has to be one of the most absolutely excruciating explora-
tions of suicidal tendencies ever put on paper. Tliere’s a more immedi-
ate political dimension to these and some other later stories as well, a
side of Tiptree’s work that isn’t really shown in this collection.

But let’s get to the important part: this is an outstanding group of
stories. Tiptree had a thorough groimd in SB’s major themes and took
themtonewheights. Even the weakest stories in this bookhave rewards,
and if sometimes there’s a vague feeling ofa dressed-up concept in place
of a plot, «// these stories have a level of style that’s as good as anyone
in the field before or since. At her best, she’s everything good science
fiction should be.

Art is often said to be a way of purging oneself of negative
impulses — catharsis and all that. Tiptree explored her horror vitae to
the fullest, but it doesn’t seem to have gone. Now, like the man in
“Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” — a fitting tide indeed for this book —
her agonies live on, though mixed with sublime laughter. What
beautiful agonies they arc.

Robert L^aalt lives in New Tork City.

Paths to Utopia

Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos by Kate Wilhelm

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991 ; $ 22.95 he; 438 pages

A Reasonable World by Damon Knight

New York: Tor, 1991; $ 17.95 he; 272 pages

reviewed by Frank Dietz

I recently had a conversation which turned to the possible methods
through which the authors of utopian literature have their fictitious
societies come into existence. Reading Kate Wilhelm’s Deads Qualified
and Damon Knight’s A Reasonable World brought this discussion to
mind. The oldest method for achieving utopia involves building a wall
(or digging a channel, as More’s King Utopus) and passing a number
of good laws. If that does not take care ofthe bad elements, one could
simply exclude them (as ntimerous single-sex utopias from Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s Herland to Rochelle Singer’s The Demeter Flower
have done), or one could educate the recalcitrant members of society.
Indeed, the Utopians in H. G. Wells’ Men Like Gods exclaim that
education is their utopia. If education fails, one can alwaj^ give the
populace bread and games (or credit cards and radio sermons, as in
Bellamy’s Looking Backward) as a bribe. In B . F. Skinner’s Walden Two
even the promise ofa lollipop is enough to teach the young Utopians to
obey the rules. Finally, many utopographers resort to old-fashioned
coercion; More’s Utopia, for instance, reports that the inhabitants of
Utopia are severely restricted in their freedom to travel.

All of these methods arc attempts to grapple with Francis Bacon’s
insight that there is in human nature generally more ofthe fool than of
the wise . Yet there is a group of novels that is literary radical, as it attacks
the problem by the roots in envisioning a fundamental change inhuman
nature. The specific methods vary — ranging from chemical agents, as in
Aldous Huxley’s Island or Frank Herbert’s The Santaroga Barrier, to
cosmic events (H. G. Wells’ In dse Days ofthe Comet, Poul Anderson’s
Brain Wave, and John Brunner’s The Stone that Never Came Down), or
the arrival ofbenign aliens who emancipate humanity from its immatur-
ity (Arthur C. Qarke’s Childhood^s End). All of these utopias envision
a better society as the result of better people, rather than changing the
environment to improve human behavior. Kate Wilhelm’s Deads
Qualified and Damon Kni^t’s A Reasonable World can be added to
this group ofradical utopias, as both depict a fundamental change in the
human mind (or more specifically the brain).

Kate Wilhelm’s novel Death Qualified is subtitled “A Mystery of

Chaos ,” and it is a very good mystery indeed . Lucas Kendricks emerges
from a drug-induced trance he has been kept in for years and flees the
campus where has been held prisoner. Shortly before he arrives at the
home of his wife Nell, a young woman’s body is found in the river
near Nell’s house. Did Lucas rape and murder ^e woman? Then Nell
finally sees Lucas, only to watch him shot and killed by an imknown
assailant a few seconds later. Unfortunately, there are no witnesses to
this scene, and Nell becomes the main suspect. Enter Barbara Hol-
loway, the daughter of a local lawyer who herself has abandoned a legal
career for several years out of dhgust with our system of jurisprudence.
At her fether’s insistence, Barbara takes on Nell’s case (after all, Barbara
is “death qualified,” i.e. legally able to defend clients in murder cases)
and begins to ask some disconcerting questions. Where was Lucas
lindridcs during the last seven years? Why did Emil Frobisher, who
hired Lucas as a research assistant, exert such an extraordinary in-
fluence over him? What happened to the mysterious research project
involving human perception that, according to Lucas, would change
the world? Why did several people connected with this project go insane
or commit suidde, as Frobisher did? Why was Lucas followed by private
detectives who obviously tried to find something he might have hidden
on the way home? Why was Lucas laughing the moment before he was
killed? The deeper Barbara probes, the more she becomes certain that
she is up against some sinister conspiracy. Yet she will need more than
tantalizing glimpses of the hidden truth to save her client from a
conviction for murder.

Why is Wlhelm’s book a “Mystery of Osaof '\ Chaos theory is used
as a leitmotifm this novel. The intricate patterns of firactals can serve as
a metaphor for the mysteries encoimtercd in this story — both those
connected with the murders and those related to the psychological
experiments that Lucas w^s involved in. Furthermore, Nell and Barbara
(and even more so Mike Dinesen, Barbara’s lover) are fescinated by
fractal geometry, and in the end the computer display of a Mandelbrot
set adds a crucial twist to the plot (and I won’t give that away).

The characters in Death Qualified seem to be irresistibly dmwn to

20 The New Yor1< Review of Science Fiction

the idea of utopia. At one point Barbara muses on how to achieve it:
“Maybe grant Ac veil ofignorance to every living being. A true veil of
ignorance. Every action of every person would be just, because you
would never know Ae recipient.” Ironically, Mike Dinescn’s descrip-
tion of his breakthrough to a utopian state of consciousness uses the
same imagery to e^^rcss Ac opposite: “AnoAer world. like going
from Ae dun-colored Kaiwas plains into Ae technicolor ofOz — You
talked once about Ae veil ofignorance, but this is Ae opposite. The
veils are gone. In Aat oAer world Acre aren’t any more v^s.” At Ae
end of Ae novel we only have a glimpse of Ae utopian potential of this
evolutionary leap. Kate Wilhelm’s utopia is truly a no-place, a space in
Ae mind and Ae text, yet Ac very remoteness of this utopian vision
makes it Ae more inAguing.

Damon Knight’s A Ke»son»bk World is Ae third volume in a
trilogy Aat includes CF(1985) and The Observers saga of

Ac invisible symbionts from outer space ^^o invade Ae human central
nervous system started out as a tightly plotted adventure story in CV,
became in Ae second volume a dystopian tale of Ae state’s attempt to
control Ae critical spirit fostered by Ae observers (and Kni^t was
marvelous in his depiction of Ac case wi A \Aich an ultraconservativc
president could suspend Ae civil rights of a large group ofpeople), and
finally has rcaAed a utopian crescendo in A Kensonahlc World.

By now Ae observer symbiont (also named McNulty’s disease,
after Ae doctor who discovered it) has spread widely ^oughout
humanity, yet Ae U.S. government still clings to Ae hope ofisolating
and eventually eliminating Ais “parasite.” (The old Sea Venture, Ae
floating hotel Aat was Ae setting of Ae first novel, is turned into a
“MeAcal Detention Facility,” i.c. a concentration camp for former
carriers of McNulty’s Asease and Aeir chil Aen) . While government-
sponsored scientists aboard Ac Sea Venture subject Ae “compulsory
volunteers” (^^at a marvelous example of Doublespeak! ) to a series of
demeaning and even painful experiments, Ae rest of Ac world slides
inexorably towarA Utopia. As Ae observers kill more and more ag-

gressive humans, war becomes impossible. Nations breakup into smaller
and smaller units, and Ae Marxian Aeam of Ae wiAering away of Ae
state comes true. At Ae same time, a revolutionary new transportation
system (whiA offers coast-to-coast mps on 23 seconds) and a move-
ment towarA a mone^ess society furAerimdermine Ae structure of Ae
old system. None of Aese events are reported in Ae staid, Adactic tone
of most classical utopias ( Aough Ae book does contain an extract from
The Moneyless Society, a treatise by Professor Palladino, Ae founder of Ae
movement against money), but are incorporated in Ac ongoing plot
started in Ae first volume. Knight’s characters, especially Dr. McNAty
and John Stevens, an assassin-tumed-investor, show creAblc reactions
in Ae face of an almost incrcAble metamorphosis of human society.

BoA novels Asprove recent statements Aat Ac wave of utopian
literature Aat began in Ae 1970s has already ebbed away. While Death
Qualified oflfers only tantalizing glimpses of Ae utopian potential
hidden in Ac human mind, A Reasonable World ventures into full-
blown utopian speculation. A passage towarA Ae end of Damon
Knight’s novel represents one of Ae most impressive affirmations
of utopian hope that I have read in years, and it deserves to be quoted
in full:

Among people bom after 2030, no one coAd remember
a world in which people starved to deaA or were homeless or
in misery. Everyone took it for granted Aat when Aey had
fimshed Aeir education Aey woAd find congemal work. They
traveled over Ae ^ole earth, healAy and opAmstic. Some
liked one climate, some anoAer. They met, fell in love, married
or Adn’t marry; Ae usual size of fiuiAies was three. Year after
year, Ae population gently declined. There was ample room,
enough for everyone. The past seemed to Aem like a long
darkness.

Prank Dietz teaches at Austin Community Collie in Texas.

Greg Cox

Excerpts from The Transylvanian Library:
A Consumer’s Guide to Vampire Fiction

OLECK, JACK

The Vault of Horror (Bantam, 1973: 122 pp.)

The Fifties, as you’ll recall, was not a great decade for supernatural
horror. Bela Jjugosi’s DracAa had met his deaA at Ae hands of Abbott
and Costello, Weird Tales -wis fading out. Hammer Films was still a
baby bat just testing its wings, and it seemed as Aough you coAdn’t
publiA a vampire story or novel uAess Acre was a spaceship in it —
except m Ae coimc books. OdAy enough, ^^hile Ae rest of the meAa
looked for UFO’s and atomic mutations, horror magazines like Tales
jrom the Crypt and The Vault of Horror were achieving levels of
popAarity (and bad taste) never to be equaled again, wiA gloriously
gory, illustrated tales ofmonsters, mamacs, and bloodthirsty Creatures
ofHeU.

Atypical story was “Midnight Mess,” drawn by Joe Orlando and
written by ciAer A1 Feldstein or William Gaines, from a 1953 issue of
Tales Jrom the Crypt, wAich ended wi A Ac memorable image of a living
man hanging upside-down from Ae rafters of an eerie restaurant, while
fanged Undead fill Aeir cups from Ac spigot embedded in his throat!

Scenes like Aat got Ac horror comics censored to deaA within a
few years, but were brou^t back to life on Ae screen decades later,
when Amicus, a British film company speciailizing in mAti-part horror
anAologies, released Tales Jh>m the Cr^t (1972) and The Vault of
Horror (1973), Ac latter featuring nothing less Aan a filmed adapta-
tion of “Midni^t Mess,” spigot and all. And Aen, of course, Acre was
Ae inevitable novelization. . . .

In Ae book, as in Ae movie, a cold-blooded murderer, fleeing Ac
scene ofhis crime, takes refuge in an obscure little diner with a very odd
clientele, and an even stranger menu: “tomato jAce,” a salty red soup,
and, as the main course, roast blood dots, cooked according to your

taste. Not even so callous a blighter as this Rogers can face a meal like
Aat wiAout revealing some human revAsion, and so Ae killer ends up
“tapped” for drinks.

As a novel based on a movie based on a series of coimc books, Ais
probably coAd have been worse. Still, Ae story feels a bit Aed by this
point, and one can’t help thinking Aat its eaiiier incarnations were a bit
more fun.

Not Aat Ae idea was enAcly dead yet; see also The Monster Club.

PRONZINI, BILL

“Thirst” {Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1973: 7 pp.)

With BARRY N. MALZBERG: “Opening a Vein” {Shadows 3,
1980:2 pp.)

Two very different stories, ranging from gritty realism to Ae hei^t
of fantasy. . .

In “Thirst,” Aree raAer unlikeable gold-himters find Acmselves
stranded in Ac sweltering height of an arid desert. All three are
Aoroughly mortal, but that doesn’t stop two of Aem, when Ac water
runs out, from turning Ae third into a human canteen. AIAough Aese
two Human Vampires survive to reach civilization, Ae giAtier of Ae pair
finds himself permanently “transformed” — if oAy in his mind. The
ending is actually a bit ambiguous, but Ac psyAological explanation
seems Ac most plausible, given Ae general absence of fangs and curses
“Opening a Vein,” on Ae oAer hand, starts right out wiA Ae
fentastic statement Aat “The last man on Earth was a vampire,” and
brings Ae Devil himself on stage by Ae end of Ae second paragraph.

The New York Review of Science Fiction 21

(Granted, it’s a short-short story so I guess they couldn’t waste time.)
By the end, this nameless vamp has not only killed the devil but,
energized by a full course of Satanic blood, presided over a second
Genesis solely for the purpose of creating a new world ofvictims. God,
in short, is a vampire.

An audacious idea, if semi-wasted in so quick a story, unlike
“Thirst,” in which a thin little plot is salvaged by good, vivid writing.
Let’s give “Vein” then points for originality, and “Thirst” an A for
execution, and note how easily both slip from mind.

RECHY, JOHN

The Va-mpires (Grove Press, 1973: 272 pp.)

This novel features voodoo, Satanism, kinky sex, psychological
warfare, souls in torment, tropical scenery, and a murder.

But no vampires.

Oh, the trappings of the legend abound — throat wounds, blood,
a wooden stake — but Rcchy employs such props to comment symboli-
cally upon the predatory nature of his characters. Set in “a beautiful hell
where victim by turns becomes victimizer,” the book concerns an
enigmatic millionaire who summons together his lovers and enemies for
an evening of power strug^es and head games. Interesting in its \^^y,
a curious mix of stylish writing and sensational subject matter, The
Vampires is included here solely because of its tide.

RICE, JEFF

The Ni^ht Stalker (Pocket Books, 1973: 188 pp.)

An interesting question: Who precisely is the Night Stallar?

Is he Janos Skorzeny, the fanged superhuman killer who plagued
Las Vegas in this novel and its popular TV adaptation? Skorzeny
certainly did a lot of nocturnal prowling wWlc in Vegas, stealing plasma
from both hospital shelves and the veins of healthy young women.

Or is the Night Stalker really Carl Kolchak, irascible nevi'sman
and monster-himter? Skorzeny eventually met a final death-by-staking
at the hands of Kolchak, but the reporter (bom Karel Kolchak in his
native Romania) went on to stalk many other creatures of the night,
including a werewolf, a vampiress, two zombies, a couple of demons,
and even Jack the Ripper himself. In the end, Carl Kolchak, the Jules de
Grandin of the 1970’s, may well be more worthy of the titular honors
than Janos Skorzeny, the featirred Undead.

The TV-movic version. The Ni^ht Stalker, actually preceded
publication of the original book. Scripted by Richard Matheson, the
movie starred Darren McGavin, who later repeated the role for a
feature-length sequel {The TJipfht Strangler') and a short-lived weekly
series. More recently, episodes of the show have been edited together
to form a few more TV -movies; 'w^tch your listings for such titles as
Crackle of Death^d The Demon and ^e Mummy. There’s even another
Kolchak book, a novelization of The Night Stranglerhy Rice, based on
a screenplay by Matheson based on characters created by Rice — are you
following this?

Anyway, the book that started it all is about a modern-day string
of vampire killings and a reporter vdio solves the case despite massive
interference from the local authorities. Most ofthe plot, in feet, revolves
arouund Kolchak’s clashes with police and politicians. The Night Stalker
could be sub-titled “Anatomy ofa Cover-Up.” Rice chose Las Vegas for
his setting because he thought it was an ideal home for a vampire seeking
anonymity, (“Menwho never come out in the daytime make up about
25% of the town’s work force.”) and also to get offhis chest some of the
fiTistrations he’d acquired working as a real-life crime reix)rter for The
Las Vegas Sun.

This is a thin book, padded out by frequent digressions on local
history and fimous mass murderers. There’s even a bibliography and

22 The New York Review of Science Fiction

appendix on Jack the Ripper. The plot bears a strong resemblence to
Progeny of the Adder, which Rice has denied reading, but adds one
additional ghoulish twist: Skorzeny starts kidnapping women instead of
killing them outright, feeding them intravenously while keeping them
tied to a bed as hiunan blood banks. A nasty but practical idea.

Generally, though, the movie was scarier.

SAMUEL, VICTOR

The Vampire Women (Popular Library, 1973: 190 pp.)

“GORGED ON AN ORGY OF BLOOD”

“THE BLOOD-DRENCHED FANGS OF LIVING DEATH!”
, a nightmare of unimagined depravity,”

The lurid quotes, above, copied from promotional copy on the
paperback release, might lead one to believe that The Vampire Women
is an especially nasty, violent, “Adult” shocker. God knows my parents
thought so when I brought it home during my junior high days . In feet,
this is one ofthe tamest, most innocuous items in this library.

Told in an epistolary form (in imitation of Stoker), the novel tells
of a femily of Naive America Stereotypes (the skeptical scientist, his
nervous wife, and a flighty teen-age girl) who visit that well-known
castle near Borgo Pass. Samuel’s Count spells his name “Drakula” but
that’s the book’s only notable iimovation. There is nothing in The
Vampire Women that hasn’t been done before; it is practically the
generic vampire adventure. Not only are the situations generally
femiliar, a few scenes are even taken directly from Dracula, completely
unchanged. The wolves’ attack on a peasant woman, for instance.

In short. The Vampire Women is inoffensive but imexciting. And
the characters are far too stupid. Nothing is more frustrating than
heroes who take forever to catch on to What- Is- Happening, despite the
presence of all the traditional clues. And in Castle Drakula, no less!

The ending hints at a possible sequel. To my knowledge, this
Coxmt Drakula has never returned.

BLACKBURN, JOHN

Our Lady of Pain (UK: Jonathan Cape, 1974; 191 pp.)

Pieces of a particularly nasty puzzle. . . .

A treasure, buried for three hundred years in gloomy old Flethar-
tam Manor, and still guarded by a mysterious occult force.

Three hardened criminals, driven to madness and stucide by visions
of their darkest fears.

A sadistic plastic surgeon ^o deliberately disfigures his patients —
and may be planning an even more diabolical operation.

An arrogant, once-great actress who hopes to revive her career by
playing the Blood Coimtess on stage.

The surprising revelation that Elizabeth Bathory had a sister,
Krisia, who escaped to England long ago. . . .

^rlady of Pain gets off to a slow start, but eventually its reporter-
hero xmcovers not only the tangled web above, but an even stranger
solution. Seems thatthe femous actress, Krisia ’s descendant, has had the
eyes of Krisia’s child surgically melded to her own, thus giving her
performances the power to drive an audience literally insane. A scary
thou^t, especially with Opening Nigjit drawing near.

Despite the prosaic early chapters, and some rather pedestrian
prose, Blackburn comes through in the end with a truly imaginative and
horrific climax, successfully invoking three powerful old legends: the
Gorgon, the Evil Eye, and the late Blood Coimtess of Himgary.

The debut of many a new play has proved dreadful, but not quite
in the same way as “Our Lady of Pain.”

Screed

(letters of comment)

Ted Chiang, Redmond, Washington

There are a few statements that ought to be clarified In Robert
Killheffer’s editorial on the response to Grog Bear’s Queen of Angels
('TANJ,” #34). Regarding the novel’s performance in the Nebula
voting, Kiliheffer says that it “didn’t even get nominated.” It would be
more precise to say that it was nominated, but it missed the cutoff for
the final ballot. I don’t know where it placed in the voting, but if
Kiliheffer knows that it fared poorly, he should say that. The phrasing
he uses could apply even if the book missed the final ballot by only
one vote.

Kiliheffer thus presents a simplistic view of the significance of a
book’s presence on the ballot. There are always books that don’t
make the final ballot that are as good as or better than those that do.
The problem is twofold: first, SFWA ret^nizes only five works in
each category; second, factions with widely disparate tastes must
compete for those five places. There’s a contingent of writers in
SFWA who write the novels that Kiliheffer dislikes, and they vote for
what they like. Each novel of theirs that gets on the ballot displaces
one that Kiliheffer would prefer. If Kiliheffer is looking for justice (to
use his word) for deserving works, he won’t find it in the Nebulas.

Another statement Kiliheffer makes is that he heard that The
New York Times Book Review menttoned Queen of Angels as one
of the year’s five best sf novels. He takes this as an indication that
'those more removed from the field can more clearly recognize the
best our writers produce." I think that this is an unwarranted conclu-
sion, resulting from misleading phrasing. If someone had said that a
long-time sf reviewer picked Queen of Angels as one of hisfavorites,
it might not have attracted Killheffer’s attention so much, but it would
have been more accurate. Gerald Jonas has been the sf reviewer for
the NYTBookReviewior years, and he’s the one who picked the top
five sf novels. I’m told he’s actually written some sf, which would
make him far from "removed from the field.” In this light, the recom-
mendation doesn’t have quite the same connotations.

Kiliheffer also thinks that Questar’s reputation prevented Queen
of Angels from reaching the audience it deserved. I think this is
unlikely, since the vast majority of sf readers are oblivious to
publishers. Undoubtedly some readers consistently read books put
out by a particular publisher, but that’s because they’re choosing
them by the books’ covers; for instance, Del Rey books all have a
certaln“look.”lthinkmost of Gibson’s readers noticed that AtonaL/sa
Overdrivedldn'i have the same cover design as his earlier books, but
I doubt many of them knew he had switched over to Bantam. Only the
most knowledgeable readers can name the publisher of a given
book, or describe that publisher’s reputation. Certainly none of the
many fans of Greg Bear’s previous novels would refuse to pick up
Queen of Angels simply b^ause of the publisher.

If Queen of Angels hasn’t received as much attention as Kilihef-
fer feels It deserves. I’d say the reason Is precisely that it’s ambitious;
the book is not an easy read. It has an experimental prose style,
which probably acts as an impediment to most readers, and its plot
develops at a relatively leisurely pace, which might frustrate readers.
The book is currently nominated for a Hugo, and I hope It wins, but
I fear it won’t; books that require this much effort are rarely rewarded.

[RKK: My apologies If, in an attempt to be brief, I made a
few points unclear. Still, I remain concerned aboutthe Nebulas
heading the way of the Oscar and the Grammy, becomingdevoid
of any relationship to quality or ambition, reflecting nothing but
popular taste and faddishness. The Nebulas aren’t that bad yet,
and I hope they won’t get that way.]

Andrew Weiner, Toronto, Ontario

.Alexei Panshin’s thesis would be more convincing if he had
actually readsomeofthesfofthe pastdecade. As many will no doubt
point out, interesting and ambitious sf is still being published, at

vartous lengths: why else would a magazine like NYRSFeven exist?

No doubt some of your respondents will go on to invoke the
dreaded Sturgeon’s Law. But I won’t, because Panshin is nonethe-
less right. There is more dross around than ever before (although
possibly no less good stuff). There is more dross because more
people are willing to read and write and publish it. Dross sells.
Interesting, ambitious sf usually doesn’t (which is why, for example,
there has been no U.S. edition of one of the very best sf novels of
recent years, Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire), and we should
probably be grateful that it’s published at all.

So unlike Panshin, I have no confidence that an audience of any
size exists for sf beyond the "standard turns” and “same-o same-o”
that he decries. The audience for serious sf (at least in North
America) is very much a minority audience, one that in the longer
term may well be served almost entirely by small press, academic
and non-category “mainstream" publishing. (It may well be, with
some differences of socio-economic status and gender, much the
same audience for serious sf that existed prior to its modern com-
modificatton). You can blame this on media sf or Late Capitalism or
declining SAT scores if you like, but it’s the reality we all have to
confront.

Panshin’s problem may be that he is a traditionalist in afield that
for the most part no longer much values — or even remembers — its
traditions. I was reminded of John W. Campbell’s initial preference for
writers who were hobbyists rather than full-timers (with the unfortu-
nate exceptbn of L. Ron Hubbard). Like Campbell, Panshin seems
to see sf writing as a higher calling (for reasons exhaustively and
exhaustingly detailed in The Wor^ Beyond the Hill). As the Evil
Marketing Types might say, this is very much "Sixties-in-the-Nine-
ties" (or should that be "Forties-in-the-Nineties"?) thinking. Charm-
ing, but not very realistic.

I share this attitude myself to some extent, but i recognize It as
a kind of fastidiousness. I have never knowingly written sf dross
(although I’ve written plenty of it in other fields). But, lacking
Panshin’s transcendental faith, I find it hard to argue rationally that
there is anything special about sf. So I have no real argument with
writers who treat sf as aform of packaged goods, or with editors who
buy it. I think, in fact, that they are probably right: this is what the
market, for the most part, demands.

But actually, I doubt there is much cynical calculation about it.
There is surely much more money to be made in writing, say, greeting
cards verse or industrial videos than the average sci-fi trilogy. Which
leads to the conclusion — amply confirmed by recent debates within
the pages of the SFWA Forum — ^that for the most part these writers
don’t think they’re writing dross at all. They think it’s pretty good. And
who are we to disagree?

[GVG: Rachel Pollack’s novel Unquenchable Fire is due to
be published by The Overlook Press early in 1992.]

Tip of the Iceberg

(conPinucd from page 23)

Shiner in The New Tork Times and Bruce Sterling in Interzone pro-
claimed Cyberpunk dead as a literary movement (if, indeed, it ever was
one).

The two male -dominated of recent time He by the wayside .

The Tiptree Award, far from being self-promotional, is an attempt to
support one of the standard tropes of the genre — the willingness of sf
to attempt to break down barriers, even as Tiptree/Sheldon’s fiction
challenged some gender-based stereotypes when it was pubUshed. That
The Tiptree Award may well focus some attention on writers, female

male, who didn’t bother trying to pretend a local wave was The Big
Kahuna is lagniappe; the award at last, rekindle the dialogue on
genderroles incategory fiction. Givensomeofthercccntproclamations
and ejaculations in the genre, we view this not only as beneficial but also
as a welcome reHef. — Kenneth L. Houston and the editors

The New York Review of Science Fiction 23

The Tip of the Iceberg

The last thing the s^fantasy/horror genres would
seem to need at this point is another award. “It is an
honor just to be nominated,” of course, but — as Ted
Chiang’s letter in this issue makes abundantly clear —
many are nominated even if few arc chosen. And
though some have made quite an issue of their nom-
inations (or failure to achieve same), it is increasingly
difficult to take awards seriously, especially those with
explicit objectivess.

That said, ihere is a new award worth attention —
possibly because the need for it may not be obvious. The
James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award will be presented to a
work which explores and expands gender roles in science
fiction and fantasy. (It is the type of award for which, had
it existed in the 1970s, Tiptree and John Varley would
have been major contenders.) Some details are still
being worked out: whether there will be an honor-
arium, whether publication outside of the United States
in a previous year precludes nomination, how short
stories and novels will be judged on the same basis, etc.
Funds are being raised ^ou^ bake sales held at sf
conventions and a chapbook, TheBitJuryMmDon^tSee,
to be published and sold to support the effort. (Those
who miss that the irony in using bake sales and cook-
books to finance a gender-refi^cting award is deliberate
will also probably imdercstimate the abilities of the or-
ganizers — Pat Murphy, Karen Joy Fowler, and Debbie
Notion — to administer the award.)

The naming of the award after Alice Sheldon’s most
famous pseudonym seems to serve two purposes, both of
which arc of interest to the staff of this publication and,
we suspect, many of om readers. It may be a first step
toward a proper evaluation of the sf of the 1970s, which
seemed for a while to have feUen through the crack
between New Wave and Cyberpunk. The time period
which saw the publication of “Tiptrec’s” best -known
works — “Houston, Houston, Do You Read," “The
Screwfly Solution,” and “The Women Men Don’t See,”
for example — as well as works such as Robert Silverberg’s
The Book of Skulls, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and
Kate Wilhelm’s Where Lute Sweet Birds Sung cannot

be said to have been a fallow one for the genre.

Perhaps even more important, the Tiptree Award —
by emphasizing the pseudonym — restates how far the
genre has not come since the days when Ted Sturgeon
proclaimed Tiptree the only interesting new writer

in the genre. Although three of the last four Nebula-
winning novels have been written by women, Interzone
still considers an “All-Female Issue” to be unusual. That
the publishers of a magazine should feel the need (and
obligation) to sennet an issue with stories by li^en Joy
Fowder, lisa Tuttle, Gwyneth Jones and Pat Murphy is
stunning; would anyone proudly declare a magazine
featuring Ted Chiang, Tony Daniel, Terry Bisson, and
Alexander Jablokov “AU-M^c”?

Part of the reason for the return to the pre-70s
mentality here may well be the cliquish nature of some of
the recent movements in category fiction. The Cy-
berpunks and the Splatterpunks, Pat Cadigan and Nancy
A. Collins aside, were primarily groups of men who
advanced their own interests. But David Schow has
declared Splatterpunk “just a phase” and both Lewis
( Continued on page 23)

i

f

I